


She Walks at Night

by fragilevixen



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Canon Divergent, Canon Rewrite, Case Fic, Episode: s06e13 Agua Mala, F/M, Louisiana Voodoo vibe, Mild Smut, RST, UST into RST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2020-12-27 12:15:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21118628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragilevixen/pseuds/fragilevixen
Summary: (Post Agua Mala)Mulder’s knack for getting himself and Scully into sticky situations leads them to the heart of NOLA at the tail end of Hurricane season after barely surviving a Floridian storm—to investigate a rumor of a notable Voodoo Queen and missing girls trying to bring her back.“Voodoo girl, but she knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win. For if someone gets too close to her, the pins stick further in.” –Tim Burton





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Starbuck09256](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starbuck09256/gifts).

> “The moon has awoken, with the sleep of the sun, the light has been broken; the spell has begun.” -Midgard Morningstar
> 
> Hurricane Mitch really didn’t flash toward the coast of Louisiana until it was a tropical depression, near the 4th of November. I’ve moved the date up and made it just a touch more intense than it actually was.
> 
> Pre Start translation:  
Bouzen = Bitch
> 
> I hope the references I made aren't too far fetched or irritating. Bear with me, loves, this one was tricky.
> 
> Disclaimer: Agent Scully, Agent Mulder, and Assistant Director Skinner belong respectively to Chris Carter, FOX Productions, and TenThirteen Productions. All other characters are original and any likeness or named similarities to any real-life persons are purely coincidental (unless, well, you’ve been told, then you should’ve expected such things and shouldn’t get upset over anything that happens to them, respectively)

_The world is full of_

_Monsters with friendly faces_

_And angels with scars._

-Heather Brewer

Thursday, October 29, 1998, 7:15 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

It had been drizzling all night within the stained, cracked walls of a legacy that had stood the test of time in the French Quarter. The high tombs and altars curved, saturated, and marked by generations of memories down to the nearest doused candlestick. The wind howled through the trees and whipped the rain against marble, the thick tapping nearly drowning out the soft, scattered taps of footsteps as they weaved through the gravel and dirt. Three palm guarded candles under darkened hoods lit the faces of their individual holders—their features highlighted by red lips, white, black, and deep red dot and line pattern around the eyes and down their cheeks. They were spiritually awake, open…ready.

“Did you bring it?” The tallest, in the center, with a thick, Haitian Creole accent kept her eyes forward, wincing as the wind nearly dragged her protective wear off of her head.

To her left, the shortest, less inclined to listen and weaker of the two, nodded in spite of the lack of light around them, her voice bursting through like nails on a chalkboard. “You concentrate on not falling on your face, I’ll worry about the incantation, Madeleine.”

“_Bouzen_,” Madeleine wanted to knock her over as the Creole slang slipped off her tongue, while they passed a line of high ossuaries with various angels and oddly shaped gargoyles.

“I’ll do this without you both if you don’t stay quiet,” Their third, the quietest, with an equally thick Creole accent snapped her fingers and nearly blew out both of their candles, her deep, mahogany and green eyes burning as she stood in front of them. “We got work to do.”

The hostile night sky was brewing another storm as a flash of lightning streaked across the rolling black clouds, momentarily illuminating the expanse of the multi-century old cemetery in a blanket of hot, blue and white light before returning to the dim. With All Hallows’ Eve just days away; the energy was already rising and the pathway was already well worn with white petals to that had been offered to their lady. It wasn’t simply to remember a fallen hero or heroine but to seek the favor of a Queen. Not just any Queen but _the_ Voodoo Queen that lay beneath the stone and marble, with the etchings and typeface on the exterior wall of her sepulcher. Most would assume the gravesite was being defaced and degraded but every mark was left by those that came before—to ask for good fortune, be granted a wish, or favors of their lady.

As they always say, however, every request comes with a sacrifice.

“Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen, Mother to two daughters of the same name, in this, your resting place, we bring you offerings of light,” Madeleine enunciated carefully as the three knelt at her marker, at her plain yet remarkable altar, guiding their candles against the side of the stone away from the pelting rain as the wind seemed to change in their favor.

“Our priestess, we bring you wound tobacco, three gold coins, and the mark of Papa Legba wrapped in silk and lace to conjure your strength,” The second, Ayanna, gathered a small satchel, arranging it carefully in front of their candles, creating a little circular offering platform for their items.

Finally, the third, Kya, pulled a needle from a cushion, jabbing her own finger as she stared at the plaque with the inscription about Marie’s legacy, her voice strong as she revealed her hair and face to the air. “I offer a sacrifice, mother of conjurers, daughter of spirits, to summon your form—to walk among us once more.”

Each pinprick was marked with an _X_ on the wall, in blood, to seal their gift to her, asking for only her presence, even in death. As if finalizing the request, the thunderclap reverberated above them and shook the hallowed ground beneath their feet. They knelt and tilted their candles with synchronized movements, spilling the black, melted wax across the stone in a singular circle while chanting ‘it is done’ to properly seal their unique, unusual even, plea to the revered Marie Laveau. It might’ve appeared as an oddity but this was a commonality as they stood and brought hands to the sky, drenching fingers in the falling rain as another streak of lightning danced across the sky.

It illuminated the top of the fence—and the visage of shadows that couldn’t possibly have existed.

“How do you know if it worked?” Kya held the front of her cloak shut, concealing the pretty dress beneath it as the rain took aim, soaking her braids.

Madeleine turned toward her, sneering at her as though she could bear witness to the expression, but all Kya could see were the dots subtly moving as her face contorted. “The Voodoo Queen will make her presence known.”

They didn’t wait to find out if their imperfect conjuring had made an impact as the wind bellowed through the willows, dragging the branches across angels with their heads bent in eternal devotion while they moved toward the front gate. Their diminishing silhouettes, in the gloomy maze of the dead, groped their way toward an exit; absent of steady light as the skies opened in another downpour. The wind ripped through the consecrated grounds and the rain battered the formerly white stone, embellishing each Mary’s tears until they were real. The lines of purple and pure, electric snow angled across the clouds, mimicking a Voodoo ritual dance, illuminating the tomb of Marie Laveau once more.

As the light faded and the thunder rolled, the soft, halo lined contour of a woman in white manifested against the backdrop of the candles still burning at her feet. She stood, motionless; her hair wrapped high, eyes piercing in the gloom, hands folded carefully in front of her with a charm hanging freely between her palms. As quickly as she appeared, she vanished with the dampening of the thunderous booms overhead…leaving the three candles extinguished, their smoke hovering in the air in a circular motion toward the skies.

Friday, October 30th 1998, 5:30 PM

New Orleans International Airport, Rental Parking

New Orleans, Louisiana

“I know you want to say it, Scully, and I think, if you want me to keep this Lumina on the road, you’d better choose your words wisely,” Mulder was already soaked from the walk to the car from the rental counter and the umbrella was inside out in the backseat, tossed haphazardly after catching a gust of wind from the wrong angle.

Scully, hair already dampened from the precipitation, watched the wipers stutter and drag across the windshield, the squeak just loud enough to be evident as they did next to nothing to get rid of the collecting droplets. “I was only going to ask where we’re staying and if you know where we’re going?”

“I don’t even need to turn my head to know you’re full of it,” Mulder was already miffed that he accidentally took the wrong road as he took the entrance onto interstate ten and merged, narrowly avoiding a big rig who didn’t want to give him space. “We’re staying down at one of the few places with a vacancy in the French Quarter that I could find with such short notice…that wasn’t crawling with college students looking to do kegs stands.”

“What? Didn’t feel like living it up in the middle of an incoming hurricane?” Scully tilted her head toward him as the blackened skies swirled, pouring down around the cars and trucks on the highway while the headwinds gathered and rocked against the driver’s side. “We left one storm for another storm and Hurricane Mitch has already been doing damage all over Central America…why are we here, Mulder?”

“A file came across my desk this morning with a newspaper clipping and a missing person’s report on a teenager from the French Quarter. Her parents are questioning the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, pushing for an investigation of an underground trafficking situation…but her connections in the community are a little more…_odd_,” Mulder hovered over the word ‘odd’ as he approached their exit, veering toward the right lane to merge.

Scully had a look on her face as he explained the situation, her eyes rolling and lips parting as the air escaped in a puff that conveyed every bit of her mood. Mulder knew that expression all too well and felt the deep, slow blink that preceded her piercing stare through the side of his face as he swallowed hard, refusing to look. This is what he had meant about choosing words wisely—but he should’ve aimed the comment at himself rather than at his enigmatic partner in the passenger seat, who was close to informing him how ridiculous he was. Sometimes, one does not need to hear the words _you’re a moron_ before getting to check into the motel and that was exactly where Mulder’s thoughts were residing as he came to a red light with his blinker on.

“Define _odd_ and try not to glitter it up with words you think I can’t understand because they are heavily rooted in something extraterrestrial,” Scully raised her eyebrows and nearly coaxed a nervous laugh from him, the old world hidden beneath palm trees and yellowing greenery.

“Do you remember our brief stint at the INS processing compound in North Carolina?” Mulder was circling the reality of what resided in the newspaper clipping, in the information regarding the teenaged Haitian.

“Haitian Voodoo?” Scully smirked and leaned her head back against the seat, reveling in his discomfort as she heard him grunt before fidgeting in the driver’s seat. “Did Skinner laugh at all when you brought this proposal to him or was he just that glad to get us out of his hair for another few days?”

“I should’ve lied and said it was the Chupacabra, you’d be flicking me a lot less shit,” Mulder knew she was delighted and part of him was relieved that she wasn’t mad, which was shades different than the trip to Florida. “At least with the Chupacabra, I’d have a body for you to slice and dice.”

“Aren’t you thoughtful?” Scully wasn’t upset with the locale this time as she marveled at the attention to detail on the historical buildings on the final few streets toward the hotel, her attention on the balconies as they dripped with water and barely sheltered the structures from the weather patterns. “You wouldn’t have been able to lie for long…not here…wrong state for that mythology.”

Scully had only witnessed the spectacle of New Orleans through the scope of history, through books that her parents would never have approved of, and word of mouth via trips that others had taken over the years. As they drove, it was more than a little apparent that this was an entirely different situation from third party information as the sounds and sights were already saturated even in this weather. She wasn’t fully prepared to witness the elaborately painted faces, elaborate dresses, and costuming before the consumption of alcohol had really begun. It was hedonistic, it was traditional, it was mildly erotic and plastered just feet from their faces…a notion that had her rethinking the buttoned-up look she had put on this morning. It couldn’t have looked that bad, though, she had already caught Mulder staring twice since final call in DC.

Not that she minded it—it was the instant need for him to look away that left a bitter sting she felt in her bones.

“The young girl, named Kya, had been associating with a couple of girls who were dabbling in Haitian Voodoo for the last year or so to an end that they had been borrowing books on conjuring spells from local, known Voodoo associates,” Mulder leaned forward a little bit, squinting through the windshield at the street signs to navigate where they were, reticent to really delve into it before unloading the trunk. “Her friends aren’t talking.”

“Refusing or are they afraid?” Scully was actually curious as she found herself fondly reminiscing about the ghostly little boy that had suckered Mulder into buying a charm from him. “You have me morbidly curious.”

Her words were like foreplay as a chill went up his neck while he hesitated to divert his field of vision toward her for a moment, thoroughly intrigued at her level of interest in the unknown for a change. “Both…kept rising their protection emblems from around their necks that had been doused in soot. I don’t know the implications of such a maneuver but it can’t be good.”

“Did anyone bother to ask where the ash came from?” Scully had been keeping her knowledge of the occult and Voodoo traditions close to the vest but flexed her intellect as Mulder pulled into a spot near a row of two-story buildings at the corner of Burgundy and St. Peter Streets. “Inn on St. Peter…Mulder, there’s no way this was approved by the Bureau to stay at.”

“It was when I lied and said the only other place available was a hostel with a half roof and no windows in the middle of hurricane season,” Mulder flashed his teeth with a smile and turned off the ignition, the broken umbrella in his peripheral less than pleasing as he opted to skip even reaching for it. “I don’t think anyone bothered to ask about the type of ash on a bronzed pendant.”

Scully joined Mulder on the sidewalk, the melancholic and oddly rhythmic melodies of a funeral procession blending with the celebration songs from both directions without concern for the weather’s plans. The daylight had barely begun to fade as they dragged a couple of suitcases into the Spanish influenced building constructed in the 1800s, the brick painted a deep burgundy, dripping rainwater across the textured tiles. Scully stayed near the doors as Mulder went to the check-in desk, her growing fascination with the surroundings only intensifying as she watched the funeral parade through the muddied glass of the only window that hadn’t been shuttered. It was haunting and poetic as men and women in a myriad of colors, black lace shrouding faces, danced along muddied sidewalks and alleys with their brass instruments and drums, scattering white petals in their wake.

“Don’t be mad…” Mulder startled her out of the trance with a palm to the small of her back, his warm fingers radiating through her damp jacket.

“What did you do this time?” Scully wanted to be surprised as she wiped the excess of water droplets off of her forearms, angling her head to judge him just a little better.

“I, apparently, wasn’t listening all that well when I made the reservation,” Mulder was watching her use that unnerving smirk as he searched for the right words to explain his massive oversight. “The woman that I spoke with insisted that she told me it was for _one room_ with _two beds_ and I remember it as _two rooms_ with a bed _each_.”

“So, you get to explain that to Skinner when he asks for the printout on the second room, then?” Scully’s voice elevated as she reached for her luggage at her side then raised her eyebrows toward the hallway and stairs. “Lead the way.”

9:45 PM

Between St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and No. 2

French Quarter, New Orleans, LA

A puff of smoke and a flash of almost turquoise and orange flames danced in front of Mulder and Scully as they meandered through the amassed crowds that had already begun to block sections of the street, with or without permission. They felt underdressed or overdressed as casual clothes looked out of place in the sea of elaborate, well-thought-out attire to pay homage to the dead. The celebration, a cross between a masquerade and a Día de los Muertos festival, had the theme of death, resurrection, and Voodoo at its center, marked by the makeshift tents with markings that represented each sect. They had been tipped off to the location of their two witnesses and had been seeking out their wares for just over thirty minutes, all the while being approached by every creature with an offering.

“You look like you are in need of a reading…and a charm,” A woman with her long, dark locks wrapped carefully atop her head in tight, desperately meticulous braids and satin strands with elaborate beadwork intermixed stepped directly in front of Scully, disregarding her personal space. “Come.”

“Wait, what?” Scully was taken aback as the woman, clad in a deep purple and red French Pompadour dress already had her by the arm, tugging her toward the shadows of a small, hut style tent with a single side drawn open. “Ma’am…wait.”

“It is tradition,” Her unassuming yet demanding, deeply Creole voice caught Scully off guard and before she could protest further, a generous yank of her wrist had her separated from Mulder before he could fully realize. “Now…you sit.”

“This seems like something that is more my partner’s speed, maybe you should have him do this instead?” Scully made eye contact with him through the sliver of light at the doorway, the flashes of fire dancers illuminating him as he shrugged his shoulders and became engulfed in the crowd.

“I don’t think you want your strictly platonic to know you don’t want to be strictly platonic,” The words slipped from the raven-haired Voodoo soothsayer like she knew Scully’s entire story in only a few glances, the power of which had her gasping for air.

Scully spun around, disbelief in her voice as she hovered by the door, the wind dancing against the back of her neck as she narrowed her eyes at the trickster before her. “What did you just say?”

“You’re a lot of things, Dana Katherine Scully, but naïve and stupid, you are not,” Each syllable was a torture device and yet, Scully didn’t want to look away as a perfect stranger proceeded to call her by her full name with no sense of irony. “Now sit.”

“Now, how exactly would you know my full name?” Scully sank into the wicker, the cushion saving her backside from the bite as she fidgeted her fingers underneath of the tablecloth. “Do you have a name or do you prefer to just be nameless?”

“I’m very good at what I do,” She reached across the small, rounded table, gesturing for Scully’s palm as she elevated her own in the middle, on a velvet doily with the burned ashes of an incense stick. “I am Ayida…given name was good enough for what chose me.”

Scully reluctantly elevated her hand across the table, her palm facing up as Ayida winked at her and marked lines of perfumed, purple-tinted incense across her palm. “I could guess you’re a palm reader but something tells me you’re about to tell me that I’m wrong…”

“The lines on our hands tell a story but they only tap the surface of a person’s story. Your name, divulged from your eyes, while your adoration of your partner out there…well, that came from your pulse point,” Ayida dabbled a little dot along the center of Scully’s middle finger and inhaled a deep breath, exhaling away her Cheshire cat grin. “You hide from your heart, Agent Scully…”

Scully didn’t like personal information unfurled in this fashion as she uncomfortably chewed on the inside of her cheek and squinted at the lines on her hand. “You’re just making guesses. Anyone could make that leap.”

Ayida took the comment as a challenge, blatantly calling out her craft as a candle flickered in the corner, the flame deepening in color, matching the hue of red in her dress for a moment as she burrowed her stare into Scully’s soul. “You’re here chasing a shadow when the one you should be looking for is your own. You’ve battled sickness with light at your side—but you keep turning away from crossing its path. You’re afraid that you’re not good enough.” 

It was enough to rattle Scully, even if it sounded vague and indirect, as she swallowed hard and looked over her shoulder, praying silently that Mulder couldn’t hear any of this. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide from him or keep a part of herself locked away but that she didn’t want to be exposed with no hope of the hammer to fall in her favor. She could hear him in the distance in awkward conversation with a group of people amidst the music and mixture of chants, drumbeats, and melodies that she’d never heard before. Ayida wasn’t menacing, by any stretch, but there was a part of her hardened, damaged heart that was crying out to know more, to see exactly what she was seeing in spite of the repercussions.

Morbid curiosity had always been a vice.

“That isn’t the only thing that terrifies you,” Ayida finally dug deep enough that Scully’s actual worry manifested in a barely audible yelp as the candles flickered in unison, burning blue in a series of flickers she snapped her fingers in the air. “Someone very close to you, long ago, gave you a crystal once upon a time, didn’t she?”

Scully ripped her hand free, eyes wide as she held the puff of air in her lungs, jolting backward while the tears formed along her waterline. “Wait, just a damn minute. That’s…that’s…”

“Too close for comfort? Your sister believed in so much more than the spiritual,” Ayida was calm, almost too calm, as she gestured for Scully to move back to the table as she opened a small satchel of silver charms and a single length of matching chain. “That crystal represents healing, strength, and compassion in Voodoo rituals. I saw you from afar, wounds no longer healing, and knew you no longer keep visible to forget her memory.”

“This is too much,” Scully managed to keep the lines of incense perfectly intact on her hand in spite of wringing her fingers to the point that they were hurting as she deepened the focus on her palm. “This is all too much.”

Ayida held a section of her skirt away from the edge of the chair and carefully crossed her legs, returning the fabric to the floor as she was shocked to find Scully extending her hand across the doily, her free hand wiping errant tears. “Is there something that you want to know or are you simply challenging me to push further into your open wound? I am not into that kind of Voodoo…as much as you might disagree.”

Scully had a picture in her mind that had been brewing for years, one that had taken shape from purely self-doubt to one of regret as she nodded slowly, her voice softer than intended. “The decision I made…to do…_this_ with my life.”

“Your line of heart, your line of life, and your line of head have points of intersection but the Girdle of Venus is light, yet fanned, you hide your sensitivity in spite of it being an ally. You hide that quality from everyone,” Ayida dragged the answer out as she dipped a feather into a container of palm oil then pulled it across the center of Scully’s palm. “Loneliness is consuming and you are in the dark with the key at the door.”

“Hey…Scully…” Mulder was wide-eyed as he pushed through the canvas opening and nearly scared Scully right out of her skin, his ears catching half of Ayida’s last words as he went off a little half-cocked. “Am I…Interrupting?”

Scully shook her head and saw that Ayida had cleared her hand of the marks, leaving only the residue of pleasantly scented palm oil along the bottom of her hand up to the tips of her fingers. “No, I think that about covers it?”

Scully knew that she wasn’t obligated to pay but she slid at least twenty dollars across, covering it with the edge of the doily and stood, embarrassment written on her face as Ayida blocked her from leaving. Confusion would’ve been an easier emotion to experience for Mulder as he watched Scully blink twice as she was stuck in the crosshairs of the palm reader that had kept her from their investigation for well over twenty minutes. Mulder cleared his throat and was met with a soul-piercing fixated look from Ayida that had him swearing her eye color changed as though she were silently delivering a warning. He knew not to move—it was the kind of glare that mothers give when they are pushing that last nerve.

“I do have one more thing,” Ayida gathered the chain and put it up and over the top of Scully’s head, letting the charms attached rattle against each other as they fell against her chest, “Wear these, for protection, for the answers you were seeking about the life you chose…and about the loneliness, if you hope to discover where you are meant to go, to do…if they come off, they must be hung near where you sleep…to remind you.”

Scully was petrified over the notion of Ayida saying that out loud in front of Mulder, but she agreed with a quiet nod and sipped the charms underneath of the material of her shirt without fully looking at them. She didn’t necessarily want to linger too long over them knowing that she had seen them before—and knew exactly what they represented. Ayida watched, like a raven hiding in the trees, as Scully moved closer to Mulder’s arm, casually seeking refuge in his familiarity without it being painfully obvious to anyone but, perhaps, the clairvoyant in the corner. Mulder furrowed his brow and assisted her with the heavy canvas, letting her back onto the sidewalk where the chilly rainfall met the heat in Scully’s cheeks and only made them more apparent as she put distance between herself and that tent.

“Scully?” Mulder barely touched the curve of her shoulder and felt her push into his palm as she tilted her head to meet his gaze.

Scully pressed her lips together and glanced around at the growing sea of faces clad in various paints and glitters, some with elastic held masks, purposely shrouding their identities from one another, her eyes slowly wandering back to Mulder. “I’m okay, I’m okay…did you find the witnesses?”

Mulder knew, beneath her shroud of grit and placating strength, that she was breaking but he held back and wiped the moisture from her face, not needing to know if they were tears or rain before pulling her hood onto the top of her head. “I did a little better than that…I found someone who knows where they went last night and is willing to get us there.”

“Are we taking a walk in the dark, Mulder?” Scully was still shell shocked as the weighty presence against her skin, hidden by her shirt, as Mulder’s eyes were doing their best to slip under her skin, into her life force.

“I promise there won’t be any broken bones…or accidents leading to either of our demises,” Mulder gestured toward an alleyway, a smile forming on his lips beneath wet, tousled hair while he tore his eyes away from hers to lead her toward their next destination.

Scully followed Mulder in the direction of a split in the crowd, where the unlit corridor of the alley hinted at secrets, lies, and more questions than answers as Mulder’s guide waited, dressed in blue, umbrella above her head. As they came to the edge of the crowd, the rolling thunder emanated from the sky, shaking the foundations of the historical French Quarter. The vibrations didn’t phase the atmosphere of praising the ultimate passing of time and the afterlife as the flames danced through the zigzags of bodies in motion. The flames dotted into an arc and married with the jagged lines across the sky as the blues mixed with the reds, casting light over the crowd.

It was then, at the center of the crowd, that the woman in white took shape, shrouded by a haze of blue smoke, smile perched on her lips, eyes glowing red as she shook her necklace full of charms around her neck. She kept her stare in the direction of Mulder and Scully before undulating like a walking serpent into the blackness.

10:30 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

“Daliah, how big is this cemetery?” Mulder was fascinated by the sprawl of the above-ground burials in spite of the decline in conditions, some parts worse than others as lack of upkeep was an ongoing problem.

“A full city block, it isn’t even our largest of the historical sites,” Daliah had Voodoo protection charms around her neck, along with a few that Scully didn’t recognize, but lacked the face paint of a priestess of any sect, her accent native to Louisiana, leaning toward the French aspect as she carried both dialects in her twang. “We don’t have much further to go—the tombs are hard to navigate at night, even with a versed traveler.”

“Thank you for doing this, even under the circumstances,” Scully kept her pocket light aimed at the ground as she matched pace just behind Daliah, the sounds of faint, distant murmurs just enough to keep her from feeling completely at ease.

“Naïve little Voodoo girls come out to Marie Laveau’s resting place and expect to become equal to the High Priestess in one incantation,” Daliah ranted as they turned a corner, passing the angels bowed in devotion, and the offering of Mary, her voice shaking as the chill brushed past her lips. “Nothing good comes from playing with the dark arts when you are not ready to dabble.”

“So it’s common?” Mulder nearly biffed it as he took a step over a white brick that had tumbled into the pathway, tripping across it and into his partner, who managed to hear him grunt prior to him vaulting forward. “Sorry, Scully…”

“You’ve got two left feet, Mulder,” Scully had held onto him at the bend of his elbow and his ribs, instinctively, and for longer than necessary as he re-established his balance.

“Common is a relative word,” Daliah turned her head to glance at the commotion and the display of affection that hadn’t meant to be caught as she cleared her throat. “A lot of novices, non-believers, believers, and highly skilled Voodoo priests and priestesses come to her for an ask—a wish. It’s not usually something massive, because, the bigger the payoff…the higher the price.”

“An expensive quid pro quo,” Scully stopped in her tracks as the sound of branches snapping apart had the hairs standing on the back of her neck, the chills down her spine. “What was that?”

“Try not to let the noises in here lure you in and unravel fear, Agent Scully,” Daliah kept her eyes forward, unbothered by the sounds that were mimicking footsteps from behind them, a concept that would have rattled anyone else. “There’s too much history within the gates to not have a few, lingering spirits that want to take advantage of the scent of fear.”

“No one is going to be able to smell fear above the odor of garlic and spicy sausage on my breath and all over my clothes from dinner…woof,” Mulder cracked the joke, much to Scully’s chagrin, and pressed a hand to his chest as the stonework of Marie Laveau’s marked up vault came into view in the spot of Daliah’s flashlight. “Is that it?”

“The very same,” Daliah crept closer, muttering a subtle blessing under her breath as she rubbed her protection emblem that rested in the center of her neckwear. “These candles were big before they expired, a circle of poured wax, and those large, centered _X_’s? Blood.”

“I would assume that isn’t a good sign,” Scully knelt next to Daliah as she pulled a small satchel from her pocket, the contents of which were heavy in her hand. “What is that?”

“Protection…” Daliah poured a swirling line of salt between them and the altar, keeping her hands away from the improperly conducted divination spell. “These girls didn’t know what they were doing and I fear that they’ve done something stupid without even realizing the gravity of it. I’m not going to pay the price for their improperly sealed conjure.”

Daliah’s focus was fixed on the altar, the smeared and splattered droplets of red along the sides of each candle, wrapped delicately at the base with smudged, soaked hair around two of the three. Her eyes opened and the gasp left her lips like a wisp of a whistle as she considered not uttering a word of it to Mulder or Scully. It was not a good sign—and one looked significantly less bright with crimson than the other. They were already paying a price for their request. A soul…cannot rise without a considerable sacrifice.

“That doesn’t exactly give me the warm-n-fuzzies about the chances of anyone finding the missing girl alive, Daliah,” Mulder could hear, and see, out of the corner of his eye, apparitions of silhouettes moving from grave to grave, ducking behind the high walls of the burial sites, a phenomenon that he believed in, but never truly experienced until now. “You’re right about this place…plays tricks on your vision.”

“You’ll be lucky to find any of them when this case is said and done, Agent Mulder,” Daliah stood and turned away from Marie Laveau’s grave, tossing the last of the salt in the air as the precipitation began to come down a little harder to meet the power of the wind from the south. “Bodies and all…”

“I know that the locale is perfect for a little cryptic delivery on the clues, but I don’t plan on being in a cemetery all night listening to riddles,” Scully felt her boots squishing in the developing mud beneath her feet as she shifted her weight and held onto her hood while the wind howled through the trees like a distant siren.

Daliah didn’t want to be here anymore as she pushed past them, gripping the handle of the umbrella as she turned her flashlight toward them. “This was blood for blood. Two of the three candles are wrapped with hair. Once the third has the same ornamentation…Laveau will be intended to walk amongst the living until sunup on the 1st. They didn’t know that their sacrifice would be each other for a night of glory for the Voodoo Queen.”

“They cannot just vanish into thin air,” Scully was elevating her voice as the lightning returned like a cipher in the air, barely making her move as she glanced to her left. “That doesn’t happen.”

Scully moved the spot of her flashlight toward the side of Marie Laveau’s reliquary and caught a glimpse of the unreal in the form of hollowed wraiths of two young Haitian girls with vacant spaces where eyes should be. As quickly as the wights presented themselves, they were gone, leaving Scully to flick the light back and forth in hopes of finding them again. It made her stomach roll and the worst of it was that Mulder hadn’t been paying attention to her motions to realize that anything had happened. As she inhaled and exhaled slow, Daliah was looking at her with her eyebrows raised, fingers wrapped around the center of her necklace again.

“You don’t know Voodoo, Agent Scully,” Daliah had power in her voice to warn them as she desperately gripped the umbrella to keep it from pulling free of her fingers, shaking her head defiantly. “Neither of you do…and if you stay here any longer? They’ll know who to come for before they finish it.”

11:30 PM

Inn on St. Peter

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

“Scully, you’re going to wear a hole in the floor if you don’t stop pacing—these rooms are old,” Mulder looked up from a reclined position in his tee-shirt and sweatpants, his toes wiggling freely while he flipped channels in their dimly lit room on the second floor.

Scully’s dark blue, satin pajamas were swaying with every step and did little to hide what resided beneath them as they clung to each of the right spots without her even noticing. Mulder definitely did as he watched the angle of her backside until she buried it against her bed and let out a frustrated groan in the process. Scully was preoccupied and wasn’t the least bit concerned over the likelihood of Mulder staring at her in her pajamas…at least until she turned her head to see his head already angled in her direction. There was nothing more obvious of being caught than a sudden jerking motion of one’s head to look as though innocence were actually a possibility.

With Mulder? It usually wasn’t.

“You aren’t the least bit concerned about the chances of not finding your missing girl?” Scully yanked a pillow onto her lap and hugged it to her chest, the charms rattling against each other as she adjusted the fluff to her chin. “Especially after the speech that your little tour guide, Daliah, delivered out there next to Marie Laveau’s crypt?”

“Two…” Mulder noticed her eyebrows going up as he came up to a seated position, tossing the remote down by his knees as he leaned against the head of the bed and felt her signature, irritated stare against his skin. “While you were showering…the local PD informed me that Ayanna, the second of the three girls, never came home tonight.”

“You can’t be this calm about an investigation that unfolded in a matter of hours,” Scully could hear the wind whipping against the shutters behind her and the spray of rain that it brought, the air in the room thick with moisture. “I’ve never seen you this calm over an unknown escalation…it’s disconcerting.”

Mulder had the remote in his hand again, his nose wrinkling as he kept his eyes looking straight on and exhaled slowly, loudly. “I’m not calm. I’m thinking and I have a lot whirling around about what happened out there—but you’re jumpy, moreso than ever. Do you…think you want to talk about it?”

Scully had been dreading the inevitable as she felt herself reaching for the charms against her chest, almost willing the fortitude to process her own thoughts as she diverted her eyes to the floor. “That woman, the Voodoo palm reader, knew things that she shouldn’t have been able to know and I wasn’t really expecting it. I know that I shouldn’t even put a second of my time into extrapolating anything from any of it but…The experience made time stop. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling I had when I walked out of the tent.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being affected by something so outside of your normal,” Mulder knew how tough it was to open up about being adversely influenced by an experience, especially when it concerned anything out of her comfort zone. “I was surprised that you stayed in there as long as you did—and I’m a little shocked she didn’t go straight for me.”

“I think that’s why she went after me,” Scully thumbed the chain and made eye-contact with Mulder, searching his face for an affirmation to delve deeper. “She saw my fear written on my face and knew I’d be resistant to what she’d divulge. I don’t know how to feel about it except for exposed.”

The lights flickered and the shutters shook against the windows, popping one of the mechanisms free that caused the door to the balcony to swing wildly with the gusts. Mulder scrambled for the shutter at the door, pulling it in until it snapped back into place and the lock flipped tight, the vibration of the wind rattling against his hand until he could close the door behind it. He had been exposed to the wind and ricochet of the downpour for only a moment, but it was enough to spray his face and soak the front of his shirt. Mulder turned around just as Scully had gotten to her feet, the pillow still in her hand as the room went completely dark, filling it with silence.

“Power’s out,” Mulder broke the quiet with a quip and had Scully letting out an awkward, necessary laugh while he groped across the floor, toward her. “You think they equip these rooms with candles?”

Scully turned on her flashlight and aimed at the nightstand, pulling the drawer open to find a stack of emergency candles to her surprise. “Ask and you shall receive…looks like someone had issues with the power here once before?”

Mulder had them lit and arranged along the two nightstands, illuminating enough of the room to keep from tripping over everything, or each other. It was eerily quiet aside from the rumblings of the storm surge outside, enough so that they could hear the other guests shouting at each other for matches and candles. Everything unexpected had happened and left both of them retreating to the confines of their beds while the distant thunder started nearing their proximity. Scully was the first to get under the covers while Mulder was still meandering through the pile of crap on his bed including a bag of sunflower seeds he had been devouring. He pushed them onto the stool sitting at the end of the bed and slid between the sheets, the chill mixing with his body heat to the point that he had goosebumps almost immediately.

“How long do you think they’ll be up yelling for candles?” Mulder was staring at the ceiling while Scully’s back was to him, widely gaped at the windows, tension through her.

“I don’t know but if I hear gunshots, I’m not moving…” Scully looked over her shoulder at him, his cadaver-esque positioning making her wonder if he was just as uncomfortable as she was. “Mulder?”

“Hmmm?” Mulder turned his head toward her, the subdued, delicately dancing light of the cast against her face as she rolled over completely.

“You can say no if it’s just, out of the question,” Scully lifted her head and leaned against her palm, the charms falling away from her skin with a clang while she swallowed her pride, her fear. “Can I sleep with you?”

“Get those things off your neck and bring another pillow, mine are flat,” Mulder was secretly losing his mind over the prospect of being inches from Scully, with no more than the thinnest, softest material keeping her skin away from a caress, but he kept his cool. “None of that, sticking your cold feet on my legs, either…I kick.”

Scully carefully dangled the charms from the lampshade, looping the chain around the top until it swung carefully from the bottom, tossing the pillow onto Mulder’s face as she slid into the bed. “I’m cold from the neck down so watch yourself.”

“Jesus, fucking, Christ,” Mulder let out a laugh as Scully’s fingers and toes simultaneously touched the side of his arm and halfway down his leg, sending a chill through the material of his sweats in the process as he pushed the pillow under her head instead. “You weren’t lying about being fucking cold…scoot that way, you’re just plain mean trying to steal my body heat!”

“Come back, you’re warmer than I expected,” Scully tugged at the bottom of his shirt and found bare, surprisingly hot skin along his abdomen, while he tried to maneuver away from her, half flailing his right arm until he was almost to the edge of the bed. “You’re going to fall off the bed and all I’m going to do is laugh…now stop, you’re making it colder.”

Mulder rolled onto his side and gave the blankets a yank to his shoulder, enveloping them both as he found himself rubbing her arm over the top of the satin pajamas, fixating on the charms as they swayed above the lit candles. He hadn’t had a chance to really look at them since Ayida had put them on her but he was seeing them clearly now, glowing in the light of the emergency candles below. Mulder squinted—protection, love, and incite lust—that last one had him inhaling a breath as though it had been revoked from him, weakly contemplating the reasoning for them. Voodoo was more than superstition; it was a way of life for so many and Scully was already following the instructions of a woman who had, admittedly, frightened her.

“Scully…why did that palmist mention something to you specifically about choices and loneliness?” Mulder had his chin close to her forehead, his hands pulling her closer to give her as much of his heat as she needed, comfortably cradling one arm underneath of her upper body. “Do you have regrets or are you questioning life?”

Scully thought back to the prophetic words from Ayida about guarding her emotions from the man that she was now intertwining limbs with, close enough to feel his heart beating against her own. She replayed the actuality of just how badly it hurt to be this close to him with no real hope still burning in her eyes. She had been running from her heart, from the possibilities that taking a chance might possess, even as they presented themselves with clear opportunity. It was never that simple—at least it never seemed that simple. Even as she felt the warmth of his hands against her back, her arms, her shoulders, something felt complicated and tentative from within her soul that she never placed until now. She never felt like she was quite enough for more.

“I don’t know if me saying it out loud will really change things,” Scully marked circles with her index along his shoulder-blade through the material of his shirt, looking up at him as though something might flicker back. “Even if I did…would it matter?”

“Anything you say to me, matters,” Mulder’s voice unexpectedly dropped an octave, teetering somewhere between affection and desire, capturing Scully’s attention as she angled her head back to really look at him.

“Ayida, the palm reader, managed to expose something about me that I was not ready to face,” Scully couldn’t fully concentrate with Mulder’s leg wrapped around her own but she held on, breathed through it, and looked into his pools of green and brown with flecks of deep gold in the center, his lashes fanning with every blink. “I don’t regret the life I chose…but the things I keep doing are the makings of an awfully lonely life. I’ve shut you out of so much and kept you away because I didn’t think you’d want to hear it, or be there—"

Mulder cut her off with an unparalleled gesture, masterfully capturing surprise and elation with the unexpected, the necessary, the singular unfolding of years of holding back. It was as though Mulder had been tacitly conceptualizing this moment for years as the hand once residing against her arm slipped to the curve of her jaw where it met cheek, stroking that place as his mouth came alive. Scully held on, lips parting to let him in and hands feverishly groping along the back of his neck, awakening the part of her guarded heart that had been crying out his name for far too long. It went beyond a twinge as the swaying of the flames mimicked their every move, reaching in the dark as Mulder rolled and encouraged her thighs around his own, wheedling a breathy moan that reverberated against his tongue.

“Mulderrrr…” Scully couldn’t help it as her head tilted back and left his lips along the curve of her neck, lavishing her with kisses while a not-so-subtle erection pressed against her inner thighs.

“I can stop if it’s too much,” Mulder could hear it in her voice as the sound of his name went ragged from her lips, the resonation of which had his head swimming as he met her waiting gaze.

“No, don’t stop,” Scully shook her head and dragged her fingers down his back until they found skin, tugging at his shirt while she fumbled with her words, agonizing over the way she must’ve sounded. “I have wanted this for so long.”

“It wouldn’t have taken walking in on a palm reader for me to want to know if you ever wanted the same things that I did, Scully,” Mulder put his weight against the flex of his arm and elbow, dotting his lips along her collarbone while painstakingly unbuttoning each pearl finished dot from the bottom up, his eyes trained on hers. “The day you walked into the basement office…I wondered how you would feel, how you would sound in so much more than conversation, and how your mouth might taste. I couldn’t keep it out of my head on the flight to Oregon, then you went and dropped that robe in front of me? I tried not to think about it but what would you have said?”

“Oh, God,” Scully bit down on her lip, the muted glow against his bedroom eyes as he found that top button and nearly disconnected it from the threads as well as the loop, his thumbs just barely between the gap in the material. “Say it…please, say it…”

“I want you,” Mulder gradually exposed porcelain skin to the air and dragged his fingers along the space between her breasts until he could see the gooseflesh appear across every inch of unveiled Scully. “Jesus…Christ…you’re fucking beautiful.”

Scully would’ve inspired a full prayer from Mulder as the meticulous, pale form beneath him was more than he expected, more than he could’ve hoped for. She licked her lips instinctively and guided his tee-shirt up and over his head, taking the time to admire every mark across his chest as she discarded it on the floor. Mulder brought her to his mouth, his arm guiding her torso up to guide the satin sleeves off and away from her, tossing it into the general direction of his shirt. Mulder allowed her back to find the pillows all over again as his hands grazed across delicately raised and hardened flesh, earning a low, stuttered moan from Scully as she arched against his hands, the shockwave of electricity flowing straight to her core. Scully dug her fingers into Mulder’s shoulders and met a look drenched in pure, raw sexuality as he lowered his lips anent her breasts.

“Yes, yes, yes, keep going,” Scully enjoyed the gradual building of every one of her senses but wanted to urge him on, as she felt his index fingers barely pulling at the waistband of her bottoms, thrilling her with the agony of taking his time.

Mulder guided her out of her bottoms, leaving her in a pair panties that seemed to match the texture of her pajamas, much to his surprise. “Eager, Scully? I would’ve thought that I’d be the one to express that…given the confession I just made.”

“Eager doesn’t go far enough,” Scully’s voice shook as she guided his hand to the space between them, pressing against the thin, diaphanous material of her panties until he could feel the heat and wetness seeping through. “That happened the second you slipped your tongue in my mouth…I can’t wait any longer.”

Mulder wanted to tease her a little more but his own, growing problem was pushing against her, throbbing against the spot just below his hand as he dragged his thumb across the silky material until Scully was undulating up to him. Scully had been concerned with being seen as fragile or breakable but as Mulder’s thumb strummed her like an instrument, she nearly sailed over the edge. Mulder dragged his fingers only once more, this time to free her of the confines of her panties, leaving her naked beneath him. Scully had her lip between her teeth as she gazed up at him, giving him the lightest of tugs to bring him back to her lips, back to the place that had started it all. There was a secret yearning to take his time but the woman already halfway to spilling over had his thoughts jumbled, knowing that they’d already taken their time to get to this point.

They had both supposed it was years of foreplay, in the oddest way deemed possible.

“Fuck,” Mulder’s mouth popped free as he felt his erection slip free, only to realize that it was Scully that had brought that action into motion as her perfect, graceful fingers gripped him just enough to make his eyes roll back. “Scullyyy…holy shit!”

Mulder inhaled sharp and connected that gaze with hers, as the distant thunder finally arrived and rolled overhead. He lingered for only a moment, caressing her thigh as her free hand glided along his midback, memorizing the details of his body in the same fashion that he had already been doing with hers. They fit together, like perfect puzzle pieces, and Mulder was careful with his first thrust as the mattress sighed beneath them and the lightning flooded through the gaps in the shutters. Rhythm slowed and hastened as their passion set the bed ablaze while the candles continued to flicker in the dark, wind whistling through the cracks in the windows and doors. They didn’t care if anyone could hear them as the moans became frantic, stuttered, and mixed with the thudding of the headboard against the wall. It was long overdue as their heartbeats met and synchronized.

He couldn’t have been more in love and she had finally given him all of her heart—as the storm raged on outside.

Saturday, October 31st 1998, 5:30 AM

Inn on St. Peter

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

They had only slept for a few hours, through the heart of the storm, and woke to the sound of the phone ringing on the nightstand between the beds. It would’ve been easier to ignore it as Mulder felt the warm, barely stirring Scully still cuddled against his chest, her arm draped up to his neck but the lull in sound only meant that the person on the other end was simply calling back after no response. Mulder groaned and smirked at the half-awake, disheveled Scully as she tilted her chin up at him, mouthing “what the fuck” as the jarring sound echoed in their room. They’d both had enough of it as Mulder rolled halfway out of the blankets to get it, glancing at the mess of nightclothes on the floor in the process.

“Mulder?” He couldn’t shake the sound of agonizing sleeplessness from his voice as he looked over at Scully with the sheets across the center of her back. “Well, that happens when you call at 5:30…Okay, you’re going to have to repeat that for me, Sergeant…two of the three girls are confirmed missing, the third hasn’t been seen since late last night?”

“What?” Scully kept her voice low as she sat up, wrapping the sheets around her in the process, her hair a wreck as she ran her fingers through it.

“It’s Halloween…you’re going to have strange shit all over the place,” Mulder paused, his face turning white as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, frustrated that he couldn’t enjoy the memory of last night for a little longer. “Okay…We’ll investigate from our end…you get people out there looking for possible bodies, as much as I don’t want to go there, these families deserve to know what happened to their daughters…Bye.”

Mulder placed the phone back on the receiver, his eyes on Scully as she reached for his hand. “What’s going on?” 

“You know how Daliah mentioned last night that the three girls made a blood deal when they went to Marie Laveau’s burial site?” Mulder reached for a pair of boxer-briefs from the pile of clothes, the frustration climbing in his voice. “Officers went out there this morning after someone reported hearing screams coming from the cemetery—when they arrived, they found a jar.”

“Mulder?” Scully didn’t like where this was going as he turned, his face less than pleased with the situation.

“The jar was filled with embalming fluid,” Mulder’s tone was somber, sober even, as he rubbed his eyes again, index lingering along the bridge of his nose. “…and six eyeballs.”

Saturday, October 31st 1998, 8:30 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

The task force had been working busily through the day, in spite of the weather destroying nearly all particulates and evidence that could’ve been used to find who could’ve orchestrated this morbid experiment. Mulder and Scully had been overworked throughout the day, interviewing every person that saw Ayanna, Kya, and Madeleine since before their experiment in the cemetery. It was another dead end—stories full of holes, people that had sworn they’d seen each of them, at the same time of the day, in opposite places, which had given the agents little hope in finding the three teens alive. The investigation, in all of its yellow, _Do Not Cross _tape, had only confirmed one thing; that the eyes they had found matched their young, missing Voodoo conjurers.

“Mulder, this is a literal dead end,” Scully could see him squinting into the dark as the sounds of celebrations began to interrupt their work, the drumbeats and chanting had begun to flood along the outside walls. “We’re not going to find anything here…not in this weather, not in the dark, not with this going on in the background.”

“We found parts of them, like breadcrumbs in the most macabre way possible,” Mulder moved closer to her, into her personal bubble, his hand on the small of her back as though he were protecting her from the wind. “They were out here and someone is doing this…”

The reverberating chants were barely discernible above the thuds of drums and wailing of trumpets as the flashing red and blue lights of local PD seemed to add to the hovering from mystics. The shadows were now blending with the fog, the air thick with moisture as the lingering storm continued to bring the wind, rain, and an intermittent thunder. Lightning blitzed across the sky and had the Agents looking up instead of down, taken aback at how intense the colors were as they skidded across the sky, leaving behind a fraction of a second long halo before the thunder cracked all the way to the ground. Neither of them would have ever noticed the woman, with her hair wrapped tightly, eyes glowing red, floating in the background in the midst of the flashing lights, her silhouette barely visible as her smile appeared and faded before she disappeared into the shadows.

An officer shouting “we got something!” from the corner had Mulder and Scully jogging to meet them, to discover what could only be described as another piece of the morbid puzzle. Mulder’s stomach spun and Scully heaved a heavy sigh as their confirmations of dread had been met—finalized by the spilling of too much blood. Mulder didn’t want to admit that he knew what it was, even as he stood, in disbelief, of the carnage that someone had inflicted on three, unlucky teenaged girls. It was too much for them to contemplate alone—it was exactly as Daliah had foretold.

“What in the fuck?” Mulder looked at the tangled mess spilled along the dulled white surface of the walkways, just feet from Marie Laveau’s tomb.

“Entrails,” Scully winced and felt the blast of cold air to the back of her neck as instructed officers clad in protective gear before turning her head away from the grisly scene. “I need someone to make sure that we identify if it belongs to one…or all of them. Start searching the surrounding area for the bodies.”

It must have been poetic justice, by design, that Mulder had missed this moment for a second time, as Scully witnessed the misty apparitions of the three teenagers just behind two angels in prayer. She blinked and the clear as day manifestation was gone, leaving her to simply grip the chain around her neck, reminding her of the gift she had been given and what it meant. Mulder squeezed her hand, pulling her focus, and nodded symbolically at her, as though her expression said what had happened, without saying anything at all.


	2. Darkness is Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story continues as All Hallow’s Eve marches on – from first spill of blood to the seconds ticking toward the witching hour as Mother Nature begins to churn in the not- so-dead of night. 
> 
> **Note, beginning of the chapter jumps backwards in time a few hours**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “As above so below, what was brought down upon me, be returned but times three, head to toe, skin and nerve, may you get exactly what you deserve.” – White Karma Return Spell (this one is from actual text)
> 
> Note: Hurricane Mitch really didn’t flash toward the coast of Louisiana until it was a tropical depression, near the 4th of November. I’ve moved the date up and made it just a touch more intense than it actually was.
> 
> Disclaimer: Agent Scully, Agent Mulder, and Assistant Director Skinner belong respectively to Chris Carter, FOX Productions, and TenThirteen Productions. All other characters are original and any likeness or named similarities to any real-life persons are purely coincidental (unless, well, you’ve been told, then you should’ve expected such things and shouldn’t get upset over anything that happens to them, respectively)

_Up is down, pleasure is pain,_

_Darkness is light,_

_Slavery is freedom,_

_Madness is sanity…_

– Anton LaVey

Saturday, October 31st 1998, 5:30 PM

1020 St. Ann Street

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

There was always a crowd gathering at the acclaimed House of Voodoo on Bourbon Street, where the statue of their patron priestess stood like a deity’s icon to be prayed to. The diehards, however, knew that the restored, standing structure on Ann Street was where Marie’s home once stood—despite the controversy of the premises being once revoked. It was quiet along the French Quarter Street, with the occasional Voodoo enthusiast passing by to pay respects with trinkets, roses, and the smallest of flasks of rum to leave, somewhat inconveniently, at the stoop of 1020 Ann. They didn’t care that their host inside was unknown as they passed the black, wrought iron façade of the window sill before continuing down the sidewalk toward the Armstrong archway.

Like shadows in the night, Ayanna, Kya, and Madeleine appeared in the lamplights, shrouded only by their, now tattered, hoods. They mirrored the plight of irresponsibly dabbling into the dark arts: mud along their previously pristine dresses, dirt under their nails, gaps in their face paint from their own fingers and deeper smudges that couldn’t quite be identified, along with the vivacity all but drained from their eyes, dread visibly setting in. They had been running for hours—ducking into dark corners to evade any sign of authority until they could find one another, in spite of the reality of their fate. Death was no more than a few paces behind and they were delaying the inevitable as they stared into their own reflections above the railing, the torch lights illuminating their visages just enough to make out their features. Their reflections contorted—eyes disappeared into nothing more than hollow vessels and mouths gaped until blood spilled, the silent screams cracking the glass in three places to solidify their status.

They were marked…indelibly.

_As above so below, what was brought down upon me, be returned but times three, head to toe, skin and nerve, may you get exactly what you deserve._

The words were echoing, booming through the empty street, as each lamp was snuffed out in unison, leaving the three girls to cling to one another as the footsteps came from every direction. They were more like stomps, blending into a cacophony of drumbeats, endlessly looping and overlapping across the other as they grew in number. Escape was on their minds but no longer a viable option as darkness blanketed the sky and enforced their brewing reticence to move away from the vibrating glass behind them as they spun toward the street. The fog formed, thick and dark, billowing from the jagged edges of buildings like intemperate smoke from a raging fire. Spirits were angry and, at the front of the pack, was their Highness with her piercing eyes and hatred brewing—ready to stamp out the remaining breath of life to claim it as her own.

This is what their sacrifice would be and nothing was more terrifying as Madeleine yanked her best friends toward the street, with hope of surviving in mind.

“I can’t see!” Ayanna was completely panicking as Madeleine’s taller, more imposing stature made it difficult to fight the forward propelling as she nearly tumbled onto the pavement. “Stop it, Mads! It’s fucking dark and I can’t see!”

“None of us can see…but I’m not waiting around to get my eyes gouged out,” Madeleine hissed, her fear enveloping her as her voice went hoarse from trembling.

_ As above so below._

Kya stumbled and skidded across the uneven pavement, tearing through her fishnets and the thin, tender flesh of her knees as cracks in the surface jutted through, leaving a dart from the top of her knees to her ankles. “This is our fault. We did this. We asked…we brought her back, now she wants payment.”

“Get up,” Madeleine didn’t want today to be the day she met her maker regardless of the sinking feeling in her gut as she gave Kya’s elbow a healthy yank to assist her to her feet. “Stop talking and just…move.”

They were foundering, the stagger of their own tapping sandals against the cement nearly indistinguishable against the backdrop of wind and thunderous battering from all directions. Madeleine naturally took the lead as the wailing of a swinging iron gate drew their collective focus, beckoning them toward a bend in the alleys between the buildings. The gate slammed against the locking mechanism and resonated down the empty street as another billow of mist rotated along the center of the sidewalks, flooding into the roadway. Kya and Ayanna were just barely behind their stronger, taller leader, with their fingers tightly clutched along the back of her cloak as their hands slipped free of one another. They would’ve loved to have said it was only their first mistake but it was only a recent one in an ongoing series of them as their toes met the edge of the storm grate and the step from onto the opposite side of the street.

“Shit,” Madeleine growled as she nearly face-planted from dragging her foot along the rise of the pathway, scraping the tips of her toes in the process. “Dammit!”

Madeleine stood still as the stinging mixed with a wet, warm sensation across six of her abraded toes, while her eyes played tricks on her as she whipped her head toward a marked silhouette in her peripheral. She focused her field of vision, squinting into the abyss as the drum-like stomping rippled into the fold, tearing away the last of her consciousness as her pupils dilated squarely on the gaps in the gate as it swung in reverse. She held in a breath as the movement switched sides, playing in the corner of her left peripheral with just enough clarity to reveal the piercingly red glow of eyes staring them down from hidden doorway at 1015 St. Ann as they hovered at the stoop. She wanted to blink them away and scream but her only, knee-jerk reaction was to stumble backwards into the street. The motion left her companions scrambling—for her, for each other, for any chance of escape as a whine filled the air.

“We have to go…” Kya was choking on the moisture in her lungs as she inhaled the gathering, pea soup mist and avoided looking anywhere but in the direction of Madeleine and Ayanna. “Now.”

Panic was the least of their problems as the distinct, throaty screech jolted against the surface of their eardrums until the ringing set in, disorienting them completely. Inevitability became inescapable as manifestations dotted along front stoops, in balconies, and along the walls, blending carefully against the brick and mortar. Ayanna felt the seizing pull of Kya’s hand away from her own as the half-shapeless umbra surrounded and enfolded them, with red, glowing eyes piercing into the crepuscular. The force of the separation knocked Madeleine onto her backside, leaving Ayanna to her own devices as the indistinct, moonless night met the vivid, menacing stare transfixed on her staggered position. She didn’t recognize the sound from her own lips as she reached forward, groping at anything, at the familiar grip of one of her friend’s hands. Kya’s screams went silent as her figure disappeared into the blackness, the banging of iron against iron as a gate slammed shut.

_ …What was brought down upon me, be returned but times three._

The chasm opened, sucking at the energy that remained as the two remaining friends wrestled with the almost invisible outlines that morphed into more than simplistic shapes. Each profile was completely absent of natural light as each slid into the orbit of another—deviating into a singular, intimidating form that towered over both girls. They had awoken a sleeping giant and she was stalking them in the night, ready to take them, piece by piece. Terror hadn’t reached deep enough as Ayanna’s weakened yet fevered grip on Madeleine’s arm tore free, leaving deep scratches across her soft, ebony flesh, kissing it with crimson. The whimpers couldn’t mask the singular shrieking as they became distant, buried beneath the blare of sibilating in the atmosphere. Madeleine was alone and the weakness was already flooding her senses as an absence of sound had her swallowing hard, audibly.

“Kya? Ayanna?” Madeleine hadn’t shown an ounce of verbal fear until now as her voice trembled and her fingers clutched at one of the streetlamps, the formidability of the darkness weighing down on her shoulders. “Come back…please don’t leave me alone.”

An eerie calm filled the side street and a singular streak of lightning clawed across the sky, preceding the static hum followed by the hollow pop as the night air went dim all over again. For an agonizingly long moment, the only sounds that Madeleine could hear were the static beats of her heart into her throat and the struggled breaths as they entered and exited her lungs. She didn’t want to move but her eyes were doing the compulsory action as her head jutted in each direction, following the spastic movements of her worst nightmares manifesting. The glowing, red eyes were the only distinguishable form in the figures, until they were inches away as the face formed and red lips curved into a prophetic sneer.

_ Head to toe, skin and nerve, may you get exactly what you deserve._

Madeleine’s mouth opened in an attempt to cry out but no sound emitted as her fingers tightened around the bronzed curve of the lamp post. The penumbra grew and gathered in the wind, churning around the post until the only shape Madeleine could see were the deepening of the glow of the red irises that kept their stare fixated on hers. As her lungs finally pushed forth a sound, the surge of growing mist and umbra alike enveloped her until the ground shook. The sky opened and roared as the wind cycled through, sweeping through the empty street, leaving nothing more than an empty spot and a wilted cloak as Madeleine’s muted cries resounded through the narrow spaces between the buildings.

9:25 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

“Scully?” Mulder pulled her from the trance-like expression, her eyes off in the distance, color all but gone from her face as she blinked rapidly and met his glance. “You okay? You look like you’ve just seen a—”

“I’m fine, Mulder,” Scully could’ve put a patent on that phrasing, down to the awkward clearing of the throat as the precipitation streaked down her cheeks. “It was nothing.”

Refusal to admit that Scully had witnessed something supernatural wasn’t something new but the look in her eyes moments before, as her hand pressed along the charms still clinging to her neck, Mulder saw a glimmer of more. He could see her grappling with fear and, at the very same time, certainty in an intangible. In an unknown. Scully didn’t want to keep looking at Mulder but the comfort of his gaze was necessary as the scent of death hovered in the air in spite of the weather pummeling against them. The red and blue lights of the growing police presence flickered against her skin as she turned, with purpose, toward the growing crowd of crime scene investigators as they began the meticulous process of collecting the evidence. Time was of the essence as every drop of water sought to degrade the scene further.

“I need an ETA on scene recovery! We’re running out of time, people!” Mulder knew that pressing the issue would be moot as he felt the chill of the wind against the back of his neck and watched the wet strands of hair fall along her cheek.

Scully still had the image of the woman’s face etched in her brain even as the examiner’s office surrounded the dwindling remains, her heightened anxiety palpable as she took a step forward, pushing against a section of yellow tape. “I’m going to need to take a look at those—immediately. The sooner, the better…following protocol is important but, I’d like to be able to give their families some answers before Thanksgiving.”

“We’ve got more than the rain to contend with,” Mulder diverted his flashlight’s spot toward the raised grating along the wall, where water was already beginning to seep in through the backwashed storm drainage. “Now I’m concerned about doing any sort of examination on…what’s there.”

Scully smirked at the irony of it and crossed the police line, giving him a look that had the hairs on his neck pushing against the collar of his shirt. “I’ve had worse obstacles, Mulder.”

“We’re under ten minutes out on the first phase of the site collection, but we’ll be here for a while after getting any last traces removed,” A gentleman in a blue coat with the medical examiner’s office logo on the breast turned toward Scully, his elbow gloves already saturated with blood. “We’ll have the cleanup crew here for at least an hour…whatever happened to get to where we are all standing, it’s a mess.”

“Do you have a prelim on a catalog?” Scully slipped into clinical mode while Mulder seemed more carefully focused on the strange pattern developing around the remains after being lifted away.

“I’d have to wager one hell of a guess, Agent Scully,” the man had a wry smile and scrunched his nose as he glanced back at two of his assistance as they muttered a couple of cuss words.

“Try,” Scully raised her eyebrows and wiped a spray of raindrops from her cheek, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I need to know what I’m up against when I go to put a scalpel near these remains.”

He huffed a sigh into the air and took another short look at the diminishing scene behind him before looking head on between them. “Three sets of entrails, the skins they came from, no evidence of clothing in or around the remains…and the only major organ left underneath of the pile were the lungs.”

“Three of them?” Mulder already knew the answer but asked it anyway, his tenor elevating.

“Three, healthy sets of lungs,” the man had a certain level of amusement in saying it as he waggled his brows at them before turning his attention to the assistants who were becoming less than pleased with doing the work alone.

“He had entirely too much fun saying that and I’m concerned that the medical examiner’s office hires fetishists,” Mulder kept his volume low as he turned toward Scully, capturing a gaze that had him questioning his own motives as he inhaled sharply and cleared his throat.

“Anatomy doesn’t get the juices flowing for you, Mulder?” Scully pressed her lips together, redistributing her gloss across the top and bottom as she raised a single brow at him.

Mulder tripped over his own feet as he followed her toward the side gate, in the direction of the flashing lights of police cars and the medical examiner’s van. “Well, I mean, not that kind of anatomy, Scully…you know that.”

“There was definitely more reassurance in that concise statement than you even realize,” Scully had a hint of playfulness even as her more immediate mental processes resided on examining the remains before the surrounding lakes swelled and backwashed into the Mississippi. “I can’t see a break in any of this cloud cover.”

Mulder’s eyes were skyward, squinting as raindrops pelted his lashes, foretelling so much more than a flood as the wind went cold at his back as he reached for the door handle of their rental parked between two squad cars. “This is going to make Florida look like a walk in the park and there’s so much more that could go wrong when considering what has transpired.”

Scully slid into the passenger seat and waited until he was inside of the cabin with her, the loud tapping of rain against the windshield as he turned on the ignition. “I didn’t pack any hip waders so let’s hope that the morgue’s examination room isn’t in a basement.”

Their conversation was hastily hushed by the National Weather Service Emergency Alert tones on the radio, interrupting all broadcasting with the squelches, beeping in sequence. Mulder was tentative to drive as he noticed a stream going down the alley just feet away. The atmospheric conditions since they had arrived weren’t ideal, but this had taken a turn as the weather-beaten, eroded ground began to take shape, slithering like an eel through the mud. The tiny, veiny rivulets were beginning to mimic the massive, surging torrent from the Mississippi as Mulder pulled onto the blacktop.

“…the National Weather Service has issued a Hurricane Warning for the following areas. Plaquemines, Lafourche, Terrebonne, Jefferson, Saint Bernard, Orleans…” The man’s voice was bordering on monotone but captivating enough as the previously slowly read-through of each Parrish that rested along the coastline and near major floodplains shaped a thick line of possible devastation.

“The field report for this case is going to be a doozy,” Mulder’s eyes widened as the tires squealed as a directional squall nearly sent them into a tailspin. “Jesus.”

“Concentrate on getting to the parking garage in one piece before thinking ahead to the details of not one but two major storms in a row while on a case,” Scully had her hands on the dash, the wet fingerprints with every little jostle as she glanced over at Mulder, who had his bottom lip firmly between his teeth. “Although, I’m sure the idea of getting out of the immediate vicinity of an autopsy by any means necessary is sounding pretty appealing to you right now.”

“It is not my fault that one of the more prominent inherited traits from my mother is a weaker constitution for the scent of death,” Mulder had his eyes on the road, blatantly ignoring the rearview mirror as the visibility began to drop in all directions. “I’ve never tried to hide that quality.”

“No, that’s true—you’ve always admitted it and I’ve always found it oddly charming,” Scully watched as the willow trees swayed in the distance, slapping the sides of buildings with every gust of wind, joining the flapping of unsecured shutters in unlit windows. “Are you still thinking about what Daliah said out there last night?”

“I mean, it’s been at the back of my mind swirling around but I think other, events, might’ve taken precedence over really staying preoccupied over Daliah trying to incite a little fear in the cemetery,” Mulder had a boyish grin that made Scully start blushing in an instant as the thoughts alone could’ve started to fog up the windows. “Why do you ask?”

“I need you to focus so I can focus,” Scully pressed her hands to her cheeks, the warmth transferring to her palms as she looked at him in her peripheral and took a deep breath. “I know that there’s not much of a likelihood of a woman rising from the dead but these girls believed in their purpose with enough intensity that someone must’ve preyed on their vulnerability—to the point that it makes me wonder if anyone who practices Voodoo is a target.”

“At the very least, it’s anyone who is a novice who decides to go out to Marie Laveau’s grave to conduct a séance in exchange for one or more of her _gifts_,” Mulder turned onto a narrow, one-way street, following the lights of the medical examiner’s van as it began to slow for a red light. “Anyone could be out there…watching and waiting for the right opportunity strike.”

“I’m a little shocked that you’re not looking for the more extreme possibility,” Scully did a double-take as the streaks of water down the passenger window morphed and deviated the natural shape of a woman, her eyes piercing and red, as she stood in the spot of a blinking street lamp. “What in the hell is that?”

“What? What are you seeing?” Mulder couldn’t turn his entire attention as the traffic signal turned green, his hesitation to transition his foot onto the gas pedal evident as Scully rolled her window down. “What’s wrong?”

The figure had all but gone, vanished into thin air just as the silhouette in the cemetery had, but the chill down Scully’s back remained as the stinging rain slapped her in the face while she stared into the abandon. “I don’t know…the light, rain, and wind combination must be playing tricks on my ordinarily solid vision.”

“The French Quarter does things to people, Scully,” Mulder could tell she was bothered as she rolled the window back up and furiously dried her face before tucking the half-drenched hair behind an ear. “No one would begrudge you the indulgence if you managed to see something out of the ordinary in a place like this.”

“I don’t know—I don’t think it’s that extreme,” Scully was moderately on the border of lying as she forced a smile and made eye contact with Mulder for a brief moment, reveling in that necessary moment. “At least it isn’t there yet.”

“I’d hope you’d tell me if it were,” Mulder turned onto a busier street, following the van as closely as the road conditions would allow, splashing water onto the sidewalk in the process. “It isn’t that I’m looking for the extreme. There’s something here and, if it’s unexplainable, it’s beginning to manifest as if it is tangible. I don’t know that it isn’t paranormal but something doesn’t feel right.”

“Does anything about a triple homicide ever feel right?” Scully could hear him holding back as he spoke just before making a final ascent into the parking structure.

“Touché,” Mulder parked on the second level and opened his door just as a gust wailed loudly through the massive structure, intensifying the layer of chills across the back of his neck. “I know it’s just the wind…but that’s eerie as shit.”

Scully’s side of the car was butted against the gap in the platform where the re-enforced steel framing and concrete casting became exposed to the open air, illuminating just how much the city had been engulfed by the incoming gale force. “It could be worse and I’m looking at it. Time is ticking away, like a bomb, and it’s manifesting in the form of the rising tide.”

11:50 PM

Sub-Floor Examination Room

Scully clicked the stop function on the recorder and pulled the shield away from her face, heaving a heavy sigh as the literal ticking of the clock affixed to the wall to the left of the doorway captured her full attention. In spite of the missing parts of their bodies—it was painfully evident to Scully that she was, without a doubt, looking at the remains of the young girls that had been conducting a ritual at Marie Laveau’s tomb. Time of death, while layered in a haze, was less than a four hour window and the remains, however desecrated, spoke of their brutal end. Scully zipped the last containment bag, carefully concealing the organs, skin, and entrails from passersby. It was a stark, sobering reality to be confirming the worst of their concerns as Scully pulled off her gloves and top layer of scrubs before dropping them into the bin for contamination collection. Her eyes glazed over each clipboard as she gathered the pen between her fingers, marking each one at the top with a singular word…incomplete.

“Where are the rest of your parts? All of you?” Scully tried not to make it a habit to talk to anything that lacked a face or a pulse but she was drawn in as she held her breath, her heart thumping against her chest as her eyes bounced between each sealed bag. “Give me something.”

The walls groaned and the lights dimmed, flickered, and returned to their stagnant level of brightness. The hum of electronics and other equipment began to stutter, almost in a prominent, swaying beat as Scully’s eyes hovered between the three rolling tables, at the window above the cabinets. The sound made Scully uneasy, unsettled, apprehensive of her own surroundings to the extent that her lungs tightened around the inhaled breath, holding it there. The sink gurgled and sputtered from deep in the pipeline causing Scully to lean away from the basin, her field of vision on the drain as it reverberated the noise from within.

“Dammit,” Scully wasn’t the kind of woman to rely heavily on Mulder’s presence but, with his absence, she was realizing just how disconcerting the lack of his physical form in the room had become as the chemical cleanliness mixed with the decidedly damp.

The charms against her skin rolled against each other, clanging center to center with a ringing, metallic jingling. Just having them around her neck made her painfully aware of the golden cross that had previously swayed routine, like another part of her wardrobe, as it now carried weight across her manubrium of sternum muscle. Fight resided there—of faith, of life, of love—and it left its mark on more than just Scully as she caught sight of its muted reflection in the glass doors of a cabinet. The lights hiccupped again, this time sputtering with a longer gap of time before returning to normalcy, the electronic buzzing becoming more of a growl with every passing second. It had warped into a warning as Scully wrapped her fingers around the edge of a clipboard.

Tick…tock…tick…tock…

Mulder must’ve known that her thoughts were on him as the door swung open, bringing a chill into the room with him as the wind howled from the empty hallway. “I’ve had my fair share of really bad ideas, Scully, but this might’ve taken the cake.”

“That’s one hell of a greeting,” Scully had a page flipped up and open on the clipboard as she glanced at Mulder in the doorway with sopping wet hair and clothes. “Is there a reason you look like a drowned rat?”

“I _feel_ like a drowned rat,” Mulder wiped the drips from his face and ran his hand through his hair as the lights started to strobe again. “How long have they been doing that?”

“Off and on for about ten minutes,” Scully still had a clipboard secured between her fingers, the top two pages flipped open as her eyes followed him as he paced along the counter with an anxious expression brewing on his face. “Mulder, you’re making that panic face again…”

“I really hope you found something useful because putting both of us in a sticky situation really needs to be worth the trouble,” Mulder’s cryptic tone was twice as concerning as the intermittent gurgling from the sink as he made eye contact with Scully. “Tide is coming in.”

“I could have told you that,” Scully rolled her eyes and glanced at the paperwork in front of her, sighing audibly as she scanned the page. “I don’t know about useful but we have three, perfectly intact sets of lungs, entrails, skin minus the place where a head would go, and preserved eyes. The rest of the organs were removed by an incredibly sharp object from two places—the neck and the abdomen. I would put a solid bet on a surgical razor.”

“No evidence of anything ritualistic?” Mulder raised an eyebrow as he crossed his arms and stood in front of her, regarding the features of her face as she looked at the page again.

“I hadn’t gotten to that part,” Scully tilted her head and renewed her gaze with his, pressing the tip of her tongue against her cheek as she searched for the words. “All three skins show marks that would correspond with fingernails and human teeth…scattered along the wrists, curve of the elbows, ribs, what is left of the neck, and collarbone area. The marks are deep enough to draw blood but still shallow that they were cosmetic, pain inflicting spots. Do you want to know the most interesting detail?”

“Don’t dangle it in front of me while we’re watching the seconds tick away,” Mulder ordinarily appreciated the game of cat and mouse but there was a level of foreboding oozing from his jittery form as he took a peek at the doorway.

“Palm oil, chalk residue, and white candle wax were along the abdominal skin, around each wound,” Scully flipped the clipboard around and put it in front of Mulder’s forearm, rubbing her lips together as another low sound emanated from the bowels of the building. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?”

“This building has a sub-basement below this one and it already has three feet of water free flowing into it,” Mulder held onto the paperwork and glanced into the hallway, toward the dip in the space, hoping that it was still clear. “It’s why I look like I’ve taking a little dip into the rising edge of the Mississippi.”

“Mulder, why didn’t you say that when you first walked in?” Scully went for the receiver hanging on the wall near the door, pressing the intercom button as she glanced back at Mulder. “I need to call in a transport to get the remains out of this room or we lose the only evidence we have.”

“The initial shock of coming down an inclined hallway and stepping in cold, muddy water hasn’t quite worn off,” Mulder didn’t really have to work at it to mystify his partner but he found her staring with more curiosity than usual as she held the phone to her ear. “Don’t look at me like I’m giving you another reason to have me committed.”

Scully pressed her lips together and held back a laugh as the attendee chattered in her ear, the inopportune timing of his quip restoring color to her cheeks as she maintained that gaze with him. “…I’m going to just interrupt you right now and let you know, I’m well aware that your lower levels are flooding but you have an ongoing Federal investigation with three sets of remains in one examination room that need to be moved immediately.”

The faucets sputtered, spraying a jet of muddied water into the basins as the force of air behind it caused a heavy bubbling sound that faltered in a series of pauses. It was ominous but not entirely unexpected as Scully’s brow lifted, her hips shifting as she stared at the metallic finish of the faucet. Mulder took a couple of hesitant steps forward while Scully had her head turned with the receiver still pressed to her cheek, the attendant upstairs chattering in her ear. The off and on gushing of water continued for another thirty or forty seconds before trickling to a stop as both agents were staring at the half-filled sinks. It wouldn’t take much with a second run to overflow onto the floor as both knew that the drains had backed into the pipes and, finally, stopped.

“I’m assuming you could hear that?” Scully took a breath and watched as Mulder leaned over the sink to peer into the cloudy water, leaving a film of grime as it splashed along the sides of the metal. “You ask for my badge number one more time and I’ll make absolutely certain that you’re the one to answer to my Assistant Director when you neglect the potential for flood waters coming into your exam room.”

“I haven’t heard that version of you in a while and I don’t know if I should be turned on or a little afraid?” Mulder knew that there was a possibility of his voice carrying but didn’t seem to mind as the bowels of the building growled again, sending a chill through the air after the distinctive sounds of glass breaking resonated in the hall.

“It is not the time for you to do this,” Scully couldn’t bury the smirk as she put her hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and bit down on her lip while meeting that questionable gaze of his. “We’re about to be ankle deep in the dirtiest water in New Orleans…and I really need you to focus.”

“I’ll go make sure that your ankle deep theory shouldn’t be more like waist deep,” Mulder’s tongue pushed against the inside of his cheek as he moved toward the door with her eyes fixated on each step he took.

Scully didn’t know if it had been the uncorking of sexual energy or the pure curiosity over venturing into a second round that had Mulder acting like a bottlenecked teenaged boy but his timing was horrendous in this respect. Undeniably, part of the terrible timing rested in the fact that Scully was stifling her own set of yearnings as she found herself wishing that she had just thrown caution to the wind while it howled through the gaps in the glass. The staff members in the building weren’t exactly in much of a hurry to check in on her progress, as it were, and a quiet, secluded turn in the hallway was no more than ten feet away. She wanted to blame the heavy charms around her neck for the animalistic desire swelling within her belly as she listened to the flutter of chaos on the line from the orderlies as they scrambled—but she knew that, even in the most extreme circumstance, plausibility had become manifest destiny. Want had morphed into need and her need was smothering the ordinarily reasonable part of her consciousness.

There was now something alive and awake within her that hadn’t been in a very long time.

Mulder skidding back into the room, the bottoms of his shoes squeaking across the tiles, made her nearly jump out of her skin, his tone less than calm as he held onto the edge of the empty counter. “I think you’re going to need to utilize that tone of voice with the staff members who are clearly sitting on their thumbs instead of moving quickly to move the remains.”

“Jesus,” Scully swallowed a yelp and nodded as she dug the tips of her fingers into the lining of her pocket while the other hand held the phone against her ear. “One of you is going to need to pay attention long enough to hear my voice or you’ll be seeing a very angry pair of FBI agents wheeling these tables up to you ourselves in about ninety seconds.”

“The mains breeched the lower doors,” Mulder was whispering, his voice laboring as he ran a hand through his messy hair. “The water is coming in with enough force that it busted the glass out of both sides.”

“We came as fast as we could,” The first of the orderlies rounded the bend, still pulling their protective gear into place as each one made eye contact with both agents. “Would’ve been sooner but some dipshit decided to hit the emergency stop on the elevators and we were between floors.”

“Yes, they just got here, thanks,” Scully pressed the corded receiver back onto the stopper and looked over at the trio of eager, wet-behind-the-ears twenty-somethings in their neck to toe plastics. “All three tables have to get to higher ground to preserve what little evidence is left of the remains…on the off chance water ends up in here.”

The second orderly, the only female, was only a few inches taller than Scully but just as physically prepped as the two men as she nodded in their direction, out of breath and patience. “It’s a safe assumption that it will—this is one of the older buildings and it’s built on a weird slant. The first floor is more like a basement and the basement is, significantly lower. Every time we have a hurricane, this is what happens.”

“How in the hell are we supposed to get out?” Mulder crossed his arms as the first of three disappeared into the hall with a rolling table.

“Boat…or maybe a large, lifted truck with four wheel drive?” The third had dark hair like Mulder and a wry smile to boot as he unlocked the wheels of his exam table, glancing in either of their direction with a bit of sarcasm laced into his retort. “Wait for the tide to go out?”

“If there’s nothing else we need to take with us then we’ll just get these three to our secondary cold storage on the fourth floor,” The female orderly popped her head back in, wisps of blond hair gathering along her forehead as her aqua and frost eyes blinked slowly at both of them from the doorway. “I’ll process the paperwork and get them to your field operating immediately—apologies for the delay.”

“Thanks,” Mulder noted the young woman’s even keel tone as she kept her stress level in check and nodded as she barely stayed for the confirmation from them, her concentration on getting to the fourth floor. “I’m assuming you got everything you needed from the examination?”

“Everything I’m going to attain from barely a quarter of remains,” Scully felt the floor vibrating beneath her heels and the haphazard swaying of the zipper against leather along her ankles. “Why? What are you up to?”

“While I was discovering our situation with the water coming in through the lower level I got a phone call from Daliah about a little event that we might want to peruse through,” Mulder had piqued her interest and evoked a fantastic sense of foreboding with a single phrase and a provocative look as he inhaled a breath, “Multiple sightings of three, red-eyed young girls matching the descriptions of our victims and a woman in white…with a glowing, red stare.”

“Boat or a lifted truck it is, then.”

1:45 AM

House of Blues

225 Decatur St, New Orleans, LA

The white and red bricks of the House of Blues shined with the sideways rain, the directional lights aimed at the blue signage, illuminating the corridor filled with costumed individuals still clamoring for their chance to get inside. Daliah remained in the archway, nodding in the direction of Mulder and Scully as they approached the growing thumping of industrial, synth music radiating from somewhere within the core of the building. She had no intention of following but urged them forward while she remained, her hands gripping the umbrella squared above her head. Scully gave a sideways glance toward Mulder over their would-be guide’s sudden reluctance to follow but he simply shrugged his shoulders, pressing on.

“Are we underdressed or overdressed Scully?” Mulder couldn’t help but notice the abundance of corsets, patent leather, and barely-there Gothic attire with a plethora of heavily visible fangs along the stonework as the music drew nearer. “Getting the distinct impression we missed the memo about a dress code.”

Scully resembled the dear in the headlights as red contact lenses and a flash of white fangs peeking out from the pout of over plumped, red lips framed beneath synthetic, blue curls had her nearly off balance. “We stick out like sore thumbs with this type of crowd and I’m starting to see exactly why Daliah opted to stay at the street entrance like a wallflower.”

_How in the hell is this not dwindling away to nothing during a hurricane?_

They were both thinking it as they came around the corner, the path of people only increasing with every length of metal barricade they passed to their right. They pitied anyone that lived within a two block radius as the distinctive sounds of 80s synth and new wave remixed blared from within the thematically self-aware club. Bodies were already in motion just steps from the door, surrounding the doormen like circling flies as Mulder and Scully ascended the steps, predicting the need for their identification as they felt eyes on them. They certainly had violated every necessary dress code for this event as their eyes found the level one, level two, and level three signs were stapled to a folding marquee, the lettering bold and italicized in red. Plain, black attire might have qualified either one of them but neither one had on neck to toe black clothes.

“Are you two lost or did you just think the uninspired jacket and pant combinations were going to suffice for _Endless Night_?” A raspy, feminine voice came from behind them as they attempted to cross the threshold, stopping both from fully entering the space. “This is a vampire ball…not a convention for a bunch of stiffs.”

Scully already had her badge out but Mulder toyed with the leather between his fingers as he made eye contact with the woman in a black corset and matching bustled skirt, his smile curving before his mouth opened. “I left my fangs in my suitcase—but, I’m sure this isn’t quite as uninspired with the badge, is it?”

“Oh, you’re Daliah’s FBI _friends_,” She was probably overdone in terms of costuming but considered it a personal point of pride as she held a hand to her hip, nearly spilling out of the top of her Baroque accurate corset with the boning clear to her thigh, ushering them to follow. “I thought it was weird when we kept getting complaints about sightings of a couple of clearly underage girls and a woman who wasn’t exactly following our dress code…not unlike the two of you. I’m Mel, by the way…Talent director and door hostess for the _Endless Night_ Vampire Ball?”

“Agent Mulder,” Mulder gave a single nod at her as she looked back at them, the tapping of her heels against the floor loud even though they were half yelling over the music. “This is Agent Scully.”

“I’m assuming that Daliah gave you the run down or should I just fill you in myself?” Mel pushed her way past the corner bar, winking at the bartender as he caught her eye.

“Daliah seems to excel at being vague,” Scully was overwhelmed by the sensation of being stuffed into this space like another sardine in the can as the scent of sweat and heavy perfumes wafted into her nostrils. “She didn’t really hint at much.”

“Well, she mentioned to me about a little increased activity surrounding one of the cemeteries—being her typical, murky self in the process. I didn’t think anything of it until the event started tonight,” Mel squinted in the direction of a group of women undulating against each other, gesturing for one of the floor crews to watch them, just in case as she continued on with her diatribe. “That’s when things got weird here. We don’t get a lot of castoffs from the Voodoo crowd so I’m sure you could understand the shock when we kept getting told by patrons of our very popular party that they kept seeing painted faces of three young girls and an older, black woman in traditional High Priestess garments.”

“How would they have been distinguished from the other…personalities amongst your guests,” Scully found herself nearly interfacing with a woman in a red dress with her teeth visible as she pretended to bite her date, eyes firmly on Scully. “I mean, there’s no shortage of unique in here.”

“That’s just it—we are traditional archetypes and we stick to it,” Mel’s sneer brought the prominence of her well-constructed fangs out in the black light as they came into the enormous space, the music booming as she raised a brow at Mulder and Scully. “When brightly painted faces, all with visibly Creole symbols, start scattering like scarecrows through a melodic, highly sexualized crowd…you take notice.”

“Scattering?” Mulder had a rather vivid image in his head, pulsing over the top of flashing lights, deep bass, and vocals that orchestrated the movements of the ballroom.

She turned, stopping directly in front of Mulder, her height balanced between both agents as she gave a provocative glance at Scully before resuming eye contact with him. “Like a strobe light—fluttering from spot to spot to spot. Did I mention you could see through them?”

“Apparitions? Really?” Scully had already witnessed something unknown in the last twenty-four hours but part of her couldn’t reason with the idea of ghostly figures in a massive room full of people. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Agent Scully, you’re in one of the most notoriously haunted cities in the world,” Mel didn’t have a grasp on personal space as she fully invaded Scully’s, the scent of juniper and black currants overwhelming every one of Scully’s senses. “A lacey mist in the dark could be so much more than a figment of one’s imagination—and most of these, apparitions as you put them, want nothing more than to feel something tactile and real again.”

The words clicked into place like a key unlocking a door as Mulder’s imagination was running over the idea of unintentional Voodoo sacrifice turning into an opportunity for a long dead Queen to get her chance at something that had been missing for far too long. It wasn’t exactly the most complex of desires but it was a realistic one, an understandable one…a necessary one. He related to such a notion as he met gazes with Scully for a short moment and saw an ember building behind her growing storm as a deeper blue wrapped around her irises. Somewhere, in Mulder’s gut, he knew Scully returned that same understanding. Mulder’s tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth as he scanned the crowd, letting the faces of each barely register as he searched for a sign.

That’s when Mulder saw the painted, crimson smile and matching eyes—burning at them from across the room.

_ How does it feel_

_ To treat me like you do?_

_ When you’ve laid your hands upon me_

_ And told me you who are?_

“Jesus Christ…” Mulder blinked and did a double-take but she was already gone, in a flash much like the harsh, white light from the stage. “Where the hell did she go?”

“Where did who go? I didn’t see anything,” Scully hadn’t witnessed it this time as she turned, looking into that same direction as him, knowing that the words were sounding entirely too familiar as he stole a glance, eyes burrowing into her soul. “Mulder, talk to me…”

“You saw her, didn’t you?” Mel’s tone was cocky as a contortionist began her act on the stage while people gawked, swaying just slightly to the remix of the music. “The Voodoo Queen wants to collect her offering and reach out to touch someone before the hourglass expires on her gift…and you saw her scoping out the crowd.”

It dawned on Mulder that there was an absence of anything eye-opening on Scully’s face, as though the bombshell had already made its way through her and settled all over again. His brow furrowed as he got lost in the same fixated look she was giving him, seeking out the answer as the dilation of her pupils spoke the truth that her mouth hadn’t. Scully had already witnessed the woman in white and he had an impulse firing, screaming that she had caught sight of that figure more than once. Mulder grasped that truth, in its silent undertaking, and perceived another instant that left Scully to question the significance and her sanity.

Consequently, Mulder was doing that very same thing as the weight of the situation sank into the corners of his overactive mind.

“Mulder?” Scully snapped her fingers in front of his face, yanking him back to reality in a split second.

“If you were Marie Laveau and you wanted to literally make contact with flesh on Halloween night, where would you go?” Mulder looked squarely at Mel, who had her arms crossed as a couple bumped unceremoniously into her back, nearly knocking her over. “Think logically.”

“To a room full of people dressed in half-familiar attire already touching each other with a certain level of willingness,” Mel rolled her eyes and did a full spin, raising both arms into the air. “Agent Mulder, are you meaning to tell me that a very dead Voodoo Queen is going to pick one of my guests to fondle? I’m with your pensive partner, you’re nuts!”

“You did mention the Voodoo ritual that those girls did in an attempt to bring back Marie Laveau, even if they were clueless to the fact that they had given a little more than a few drops of blood to the cause,” Scully shook her head and licked the corner of her mouth as she glanced at the rafters then back at Mulder. “I can’t believe I’m even uttering this but we need to consider the extreme.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Mel was flippant and hypersensitive to her surroundings as she could hear a clap of thunder over the music, a sensation of which sent a thrum through her body as her previously captivating grin faded from view. “I have enough to worry about with Mother Nature being a raging, unpredictable bitch threatening to shut down a successful event now this? Fuck my life.”

“It means resume your event,” Mulder wasn’t looking directly at Mel but his words were entirely aimed at her as he continued to scan through the crowd while the floor vibrated with another deep burst of thunder. “Keep your eyes open and be alert. If you see something before we do, raise your hand straight into the air like you’re reaching for the catwalk, one of us will find you.”

Scully waited for Mel to nod and disappear before making eye contact with her partner, seeing so much more than urgency resonating as his lashes twitched to the beat of the music. “You take the floor and I’ll take the balcony?”

“You read my mind, Scully,” Mulder had a smirk sneaking onto the corners of his lips as the scent of her soap and perfume collided with the other odors floating in the air, the comingling of pheromones doing little to assist in his endeavor to concentrate. “If anything out of the ordinary pops out at you while you’re up there just signal to me. You can shout across the ballroom or flag me down—I’ll find a way to get to you.”

Scully was up on her tiptoes as she took a well-timed bump to the backside from another patron as a moment to grip the front of his damp jacket, breathing him in like a drug. “That sounds like a promise, Mulder.”

“When is it not?” Mulder winked and watched as Scully moved toward the stairwell, spiraling into the balcony.

Mulder glanced at his watch, as the minute hand ticked into place at five after two, as the spotlights above swiveled and spun across the floor, illuminating the crowd. The drumbeat, much like the seconds ticking away at his wrist, tapped and thumped along the floor, rattling through his bones to the top of his head. It was unnerving—teeming with a sense of foreboding. His chin lifted and his eyes met a fleeting shadow, with eyes, glowing red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotes by:  
White Karma Return Spell  
Anton LaVey
> 
> Lyrics from:  
Blue Monday - New Order
> 
> I am so sorry it took so long to get the new chapters up and out but I did a lot of research to work this one -- and it wasn't the easiest to really, extrapolate. I hope that the add-ons are loved. The 3rd chapter will be up tomorrow night (3/27)


	3. Blue Flame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The witching hour and a building mystery; as daylight approaches, more than a brewing storm becomes an obstacle for Mulder and Scully. The flood rises and a curse continues…leaving Mulder, Scully, and a ballroom full of guests in peril with time slowly ticking away.
> 
> “A flood of emotions rushes into me. Pain and anger. Sadness and pity. But most surprising of all, hope.” –Jay Asher

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Hurricane Mitch really didn’t flash toward the coast of Louisiana until it was a tropical depression, near the 4th of November. I’ve moved the date up and made it just a touch more intense than it actually was. Also, I have not been inside of this venue so I am uncertain of the exact layout. I’ve made creative guesses from photos. Additional note, I know that Agua Mala is technically much earlier and Hollywood A.D. took place during October, but this time frame made a lot of sense to utilize.
> 
> Mwen la translates to I am here in Creole. Kounya translates to right now in Creole.  
Nou vin fènwa translates to we become the darkness in Creole.  
No offense is intended if I botched ANY of these translations – I found them in rough Creole books and parsed them together.
> 
> Disclaimer: Agent Scully, Agent Mulder, and Assistant Director Skinner belong respectively to Chris Carter, FOX Productions, and TenThirteen Productions. All other characters are original and any likeness or named similarities to any real-life persons are purely coincidental (unless, well, you’ve been told, then you should’ve expected such things and shouldn’t get upset over anything that happens to them, respectively)

_The boundaries which divide_

_Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague._

_Who shall say where one ends, and where the other begins?_

-Edgar Allan Poe

3:00 AM

Scully’s fingers gripped the edge of the railing, peering out at the crowd, at the swell of self-indulgence while eager drinkers shoved past her without a second thought to consider her personal space. The business-minded part of her wanted to be offended while the adventurous woman often closeted was wetting her lips over the physical contact. The ideal was a conundrum, she had decided, as she kept her eyes moving and her hands at her side. The balcony was no better than the main floor as individuals packed in like sardines as they danced against one another, clinging as though life depended on it. They were rallying around that once a year, behind closed doors kind of a life and Scully felt a connection to all of it even though she looked much like their opposition. Mulder had already left her line of sight twice because of the blockade of people in front of her that were clinging to the edge of the railing with digits clasped around stemware or each other. The sky roared overhead and the walls shook against the wailing of gale force. The storm was quickly making landfall—and not one of the party goers were showing much signs of slowing as a hue of blue and green flooded the dance floor.

“Mwen la,” A chill hit the back of Scully’s neck seconds before the shrill, scraping voice of a woman met her right ear, accompanied by a single index to her pulse point. “Kounya.”

Scully spun around and bumped her backside against the column, fear written on her face as she made eye contact with a group of girls as they sipped drinks around a circular, high table. “What in the hell…Did anyone see a woman come up behind me?”

“Maybe you’ve had a little too much to drink tonight, honey,” The irony resided in the fact that the girl that muttered the comment in Scully’s direction could barely string the sentence together as her words slurred and her tongue moved as though it were entirely too big for her mouth.

“She’s not partying,” One of her companions was laughing as she chewed on the edge of her olive at the end of a decorative spear, the shimmer of her nail enamel catching the light. “Looks like a stiff…probably a cop.”

The girl with the martini glass perched, readied for another sloppy drink, leaned against her elbows and angled her free index at Scully, enthralled fully as she nearly spilled out of her corset in front of everyone. “Are you really a cop? Can you show me your badge? Is it shiny? I bet it’s shiny.”

“I don’t have time for this,” Scully might’ve been amused under normal circumstances but the patience was wearing thin as the foreign words still tingled against her ear while she pushed past the trio of girls as they drank. “Enjoy the rest of your night, ladies.”

The least intoxicated of the three stepped in front of Scully, squinting at her for a moment as she maintained eye contact, while the bass beat vibrated beneath their soles. “Was the woman you’re looking for whispering in your ear?”

“What did you just ask me?” Scully scrutinized her face, at the pale features beneath a synthetic, black wig and too much makeup, with more vivid blues than her own gaping right through her as though she weren’t there.

“You asked if we saw a woman come up behind you,” The costumed woman’s lashes fluttered as she cleared her throat and moved a spiraled martini glass onto the lacquer top of the table next to her. “I’m asking you if the woman you’re asking about whispered in your ear because…she whispered in mine.”

The theory that Marie Laveau was doing her best to breach the spiritual plane and make contact with the physical world was coming to fruition and sent a shiver down her spine. Scully could still feel the icy, split-second long touch against her skin, and hear each locution as it made the nerves shake along her vertebrae. _Mwen la kounya_. It was going to haunt her nightmares for weeks, right along with the flashes of those invasive, red eyes. Scully had a split-second’s thought to vomit as her skin crawled and her stomach rolled while her knees locked and hands stayed at her sides. It was more than enough to shake her faith to the core and turn it on its heel as pure questionability stared her in the face.

“Did you just say that she whispered in your ear?” Scully knew, straight to her beating heart, that she didn’t need to ask that question, but her skepticism and need to hold onto the last shreds of rationality pushed the words out. “Is that what you said?”

“She whispered something Creole in my ear,” The woman was nonchalant and unapologetic as she took a step forward, rolling her fingers along the necklace that matched her corset. “I felt the chill of her nails against the space between my shoulders—you only get that with someone who isn’t supposed to be here. Somebody must’ve gone and…Conjured her right up, I’m sure.”

“Conjured?” Scully spotted Mulder in the crowd for a moment looking up at her as he pushed his way through the left side of the crowd, his apprehension written on his face.

“You’re in New Orleans, officer_ ginger_,” Her accent bit into the words as she retreated toward her friends, the mischievous grin residing on painted lips. “Voodoo is religion and this is the hour of worship—hold on tight, sister, it’s gonna be a very bumpy night.”

“Excuse me,” Scully bit down on the inside of her cheek as she had her fingers to her temple while turning her feet in the direction of the balcony’s edge.

Scully couldn’t help but think back on why Daliah stayed outside, recollecting the clearest of details of her hand as she held the umbrella in the alley as the white, smeared markings on her fingers stood out with another flash of lightning in the distance. Scully’s knees buckled as the sick sensation worked its way through her stomach; Daliah knew more than she had let on in a way that couldn’t have possibly been positive. There was no other explanation and they were beginning to resemble the cornered rat with the large, hungry cat nearby, ready to pounce. Scully went to the railing and made eye contact with Mulder, waving an arm in a direction toward the double doors at the lit exit sign. She didn’t want to suspect that it was a potentially detrimental portent as she raced down the stairs, shoving past slow moving, weary party goers.

“You’ve got that look that is usually reserved for when I’ve just gotten us both wrapped up into an afternoon long meeting over expenditures,” Mulder met her at the gap in the crowd near the closed doors that led to the street.

“Daliah had white chalk all over her fingers and it can’t be a coincidence that she’d refuse to come in here with us,” Scully bounded down the remaining steps, putting distance between them and the sound of music in the ballroom as she started frantically pushing on each door, to no avail. “That is exactly what I was afraid of.”

“Do you suddenly feel like you’re at the prom and Carrie just got crowned Prom Queen?” Mulder couldn’t resist the wisecrack and earned a sideways, dirty look from Scully as she switched from the left door to the right, desperately pushing on the lever. “Sorry.”

“I don’t know enough about Voodoo lore to understand what any of it means but if she had chalk then she also had candles,” Scully sprinted to another set of doors, pushing the handles until they clicked wildly but didn’t budge while Mulder addressed the other two sets.

“Maybe it’s something similar to witchcraft where the act of lighting candles and chalk lines are a barrier to prevent spirits from crossing the line,” Mulder kicked the final door with enough force that it opened about a half a foot and slammed back, knocking him on his backside. “…Son of a bitch.”

Scully spun around as the squeal of rubber skidding across the flooring preceded the thud, her care written on her face as she went straight to him. “Are you okay? Did you injure anything?”

“Only what I normally injure,” Mulder winced and let her help him to a standing position, dusting off his own backside as his eyes meandered back toward the doors. “My pride.”

Both went to separate doors as the music played on inside, shoving their backs against the sturdy material as the wind whistled through the gaps in the frame and the squall slapped against the rectangular safety glass. The ground groaned as though it were splitting apart and the smell of salt and sewer belched into the entry as water trickled in along each threshold sill. Scully’s boots splashed first as she changed doors while Mulder seemed particularly interested in staring out one of the windows as he angled his shoulder against the cold, painted door. It wouldn’t be long before they’d start to attract attention from the restless party goers that were still inside, especially if anyone suddenly had the desire to leave.

“There’s got to be another way out of here, Mulder,” Scully went up the few steps toward a janitor’s door, turning the standard handle until it popped open to reveal a filled closet. “Or at least something that can help get us one step closer before we have more panic than we can handle.”

“Scully, have you ever seen a candle…hover?” Mulder didn’t know exactly how to pose the question as he squinted and stopped his motion while she jabbed the handle of a broom against the door closer’s metal cover.

“What do you mean by hover?” Scully’s voice was coming out in a series of grunts as she tried to pry the arm away from the spindle, hoping to create a little give as she started to attract the attention of stragglers from the edge of the ballroom. “That’s a very vague question to ask me at a time like this.”

“Vague as it may be, you may want to stop with the broom for a second and take a peek out of one of these windows to see exactly what I mean,” Mulder tapped on the glass as his boots splashed in the accumulating water along the tiles, the stink of filth comingling with ocean as rotten met free flowing current.

Scully propped the broom up along the center frame and wiped the fog from the inside of the pane, glancing down at the climbing water until the dimmed, bluish flame finally caught her eye. “The flames are sputtering, but strong, and the centers…have a deep, blue hue that almost fades to black. Candles are white with streaks of black. I suppose I should’ve figured that Daliah had a little more up her sleeve than she let on about her relationship with Haitian Voodoo.”

“Don’t tell me you learned that in Catechism,” Mulder had a strained grin on his face as he glanced over at her, watching her scrutinize his every move.

“Missy had an affinity for pissing off my dad and that usually involved burning sage in the bathroom or in her bedroom, bringing home every shape and size of candle, and reading every book about witches and Wiccan lore,” Scully pushed her back into the door until it gave only the most minute of inches and shoved back into place, nearly knocking her forward. “Did she chain the doors shut?”

“I don’t see anything holding the doors closed,” Mulder had his forehead pressed against the glass, his breath instantly fogging up the glass with every exhale. “Do you?”

Before Scully could fully peer out the window, Daliah’s deep, brown eyes with flecks of gold hues stared back at her, framed by streaks of red and white face paint across her bronzed skin, her features heightened to the point of chiseling them out. Scully staggered backward as Daliah slammed her hands against the doors, setting off a chain reaction of every barrier shaking as though they were holding back a coming stampede. Mulder went to Scully’s side as Daliah’s rhythmic humming vibrated through the doors, carrying the sound into the empty space while the water rose to their ankles in a single breath. The sapphire glow elevated, fluttering like a heart as the soft light filled each window, with the last rising to the space below Daliah’s chin, danger in her eyes as a glint of a smile creeped across her mouth.

“Open the doors, Daliah,” Scully wasn’t playing games as she glared at the woman who had been dishing out half-truths since they met. “There are at least three hundred people in there who are going to start panicking if they realize they can’t leave this building—let us out.”

“I cannot do that, Agent Scully,” Daliah’s fingers were pressed into the metal as the rain pelted the side of the building in the narrowed walkway between the high rises. “She cannot disappear into the dawn—and she cannot pass through these doors while she can sink her teeth into flesh.”

“So you’ll leave her in a ballroom full of eager vampire enthusiasts that are three sheets to the wind?” Mulder was irate as he banged on the heavy barrier, the echo of the pounding sailing to the rafters as lightning struck again. “Do you understand how stupid that sounds?”

“Sacrifices must be made and she must be contained from running the streets of an ailing New Orleans,” Daliah was monotone, emotionless as her eyes darted between them, her head still with little droplets collecting as her paint began to thin out. “I chose the path and sealed her in…I cannot and will not undo it. It is done.”

“What do you mean, you sealed her in?” Scully already had a foreboding feeling creeping in as she asked in spite of herself. “Daliah, what have you done?”

“Undoing the mistakes those little amateur fanatics did and keeping Marie Laveau confined in one spot until the witching hour has expired…nou vin fènwa,” Daliah sneered, staring directly at Scully, and blew out the candle, setting off a causal nexus that snuffed out every blue flame like falling dominoes.

The hum of electronics grew louder and erratic, then popped before going silent as the green exit lights went dark while the emergency lights started to strobe as the music died. The cause and effect ushered in the expected melee as the panicked screams came from inside the ballroom while water continued to rise along the steps. Their situation had gone from bad to worse as Daliah had all but disappeared from view, leaving nothing more than a cloud of smoke in her wake as the building lurched from the gale force outside. Scully spun around as the sputtering and creaking of pipes came from inside the walls, her eyes following the sound as it emanated from the kitchen and the hallway that led straight to the restrooms.

The pipes were bursting.

“What in the hell is going on out there?” Mel shoved her way past the edge of huddled, frightened guests who were starting to push against the overwhelmed security staff that were doing their best to keep everyone inside of the ballroom. “Let me rephrase that…what in the _fuck_ is going on in here? Why are my guests in the dark? Why is every emergency exit locked from the outside?”

“All of those questions, and more, should be directed to your Voodoo obsessed friend Daliah,” Mulder wasn’t the least bit amused as he trudged through the rising water while he shined his utility light at her, the frustration growing as the wind whistled through the gaps in each door. “We’ve got a big problem.”

“That…bitch,” Mel kicked off both of her heels and held onto them, dropping to a height closer to Scully’s as she opted to gain agility without the stilettos underneath of her. “They’re not locked, are they? She sealed us in with her goddamn Voodoo magic. I don’t know how much either of you believe in any of this but I’ve been raised around this all of my life and when people go fucking with the dark arts, that’s how someone ends up dead and I’m not going to watch this event be front-page news because of dead bodies in a hurricane.”

“No one is going to die tonight,” Scully already wanted to vomit and the acrid, pungent odor wafting into the building was doing her sense of smell no favors as she nearly took a tumble into the rising water. “Get everyone into the balcony. Now.”

The sound of trickling preceded the shimmering mass of rushing water rolling across the flooring as it came from the hallway toward them, meeting the rising, muddy loch forming along the stairs. Mulder’s instincts kicked in as his fingers darted out to meet Scully’s wrist, pulling her away from the metallic, crimped tread and into his proximity, enough to feel his breath against her skin. The flickering of light of the small, metallic flashlight in his free hand flashed between them, illuminating her visage as she peered up at him, eyes wide. She’d looked at him like this a number of times and the sensation that her stare inspired never ceased to make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck as he took in a breath, wishing they were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Mel swayed as the slippery, growing reservoir of chilly, muddy fluid touched the edge of her dress as she backed up toward the ballroom door. “I’m going to need a damn good story for sending a herd of people up a flight of stairs to wait out a flood.”

Mulder released his grip on Scully and turned his head in Mel’s direction, shaking his head just slightly as an unintentional laugh came rolling out. “Give them an option to drown or not?”

“Keep them as close to the wall as possible,” Scully captured Mel’s attention, contemplating the dark with multiple phantoms moving about, with the potential of taking a bite out of a person. “We’ll work on a way to get out of this…”

“I am so lucky that I have double the staff tonight to wrangle these…heathens,” Mel had her hand on the door handle, fingers wrapped around the metal grip as she glanced back at them, with her shoes still in the free hand. “If I manage to find Daliah after all of this—”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Mulder already knew where her mental process was going as he cut her off and moved toward the hallway where the loud bleating was echoing from the bowels of the building, calling out to them. “We gotta figure out a way to get through the hour or…evacuate the building.”

Mel disappeared into the ballroom as Scully went after Mulder, the sounds of splashing meeting the taps of her heels against the wood planks beneath her. “An evacuation would put hundreds on a roof in a hurricane with heavy strikes of lightning, Mulder…you can’t be contemplating that.”

“Well, then we should hope it doesn’t come to that, but I don’t see any other choice when we’re already up to three feet of water at the entrance and none of the doors will open,” Mulder pressed his hand against the trembling divider door, the scattered spit of water popping out from above the threshold, the whine of pressure building. “Scully?”

“Yeah?” Scully had the beam of her flashlight aimed at the ceiling, scoping out the system of trap doors along the corners as she glanced at Mulder.

“Move,” Mulder began backing away, bumping into her as he heard the hinges give and the frame buckle, the swelling of metal against the pressure grip.

The screws in the hinges were the first to lose the battle, followed by the door handle as it popped free, sending the metal divide against the wall, freeing the cascade of flowing water behind it. The reaction time for both agents was low as Scully barely had a chance to take three full steps backward while Mulder had gotten in two, wider footfalls before the incoming rapids rolled across the floor as though it had a hefty, palpable current. The rush of water carried its own sound, mimicking a low, menacing growl that seemed to have no end as it mowed down Scully, knocking both of her feet out from under her. Mulder didn’t stay upright for much longer, his fingers stretching forward toward his partner as he lost sight of her as the wave of water overtook her petite frame, carrying her toward the opposite wall.

“Come on, where are you?” Mulder met the curve of the brightly adorned wall with an awkward thud, barely above the rush of water as he groped into the murky, frigid flood.

Scully’s soaked figure popped up just a few feet away, her inhale reverberating through the empty, nearly submerged space as she groped for the railing to regain a semblance of balance. “Jesus…we need to get out of here, Mulder.”

“It can’t be any better in the ballroom,” Mulder was already pulling her forward, toward the ballroom doors, the swiftly moving current still nipping at their limbs as he tugged the door open enough to get inside.

“It can’t be any worse,” Scully held onto the handle and the front of his shirt as the excess pressure against her waistline had her moving in two directions, like a whirlpool was forming underneath the surface of the water.

Mulder nodded as he wrapped his arm around her, bracing her against him as the open space of the ballroom became so much louder in the dark. The door pushed shut against the weight of the water, bobbing back and forth as the slipstream swirled while the level continued to climb. The balcony level, framed by the railings that jutted out from the edge of the blue arch of the stage, sheltered the huddled masses as the walls shuddered with every gust of wind. The space was absent of nearly all light aside from the random streams of light from keychain, tactical style flashlights in the palms of each security guard that had managed to wrangle every frightened guest. The gentle sounds of sobs and scattered, worried conversations were audible above the whirring of water as it filled the building like a basin.

“This is bad,” Mel called down to them, shining her flashlight down on them as they stood at the base of the stairs, her fear visible as the water had overtaken the first six steps. “That’s four feet…isn’t it?”

“More or less,” Mulder had a wave of guilt wreaking havoc on his gut as the light caught the extent of how badly Scully had gotten drenched, down to the budding goosebumps across her collarbone from freshly popped buttons. “Scully…you lost a few…passengers.”

“The charms got caught in the updraft and busted them,” Scully didn’t flinch despite the weight of her jacket around her shoulders as she glanced at Mulder, burying a smile as she glanced at the step below. “Another shirt ruined because of a case. I’m going to have to start billing you for every missing button, torn hem, or stain.”

“Good to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Mulder smirked as another clap of thunder rattled the foundation, jiggling the wood underneath of them until he was forced to brace himself against the railing. “This hurricane is trying to take the building down.”

Scully shed her coat on the way up the stairs, extending it over the edge of the upper level bar to drop the excess weight in the process, removing the pertinent items from the pockets as Mulder did a once over of the huddled crowd. Their eyes met for a moment as Scully ran her fingers through her hair, slicking back the wet mess before she did a mental check of her particulars: identification, badge, gun, and the phone that was now completely useless. Mulder nodded his head in her direction as she finagled with the front of her blouse until the bow-clad cradle was no longer playing peek-a-boo with anyone who was paying enough attention. Scully twisted her pocket light until it had a solid beam of light aimed toward the stairwell, toward the whitewater as it bubbled like a fresh pot rolling to a boil.

“One of the guests has a bite mark on their arm,” Mulder caught her unaware as he came up behind her as she circled the small spotlight around the edge of the stairs, hoping to catch anything from her vantage point. “She remembered feeling it happen before they came up the stairs…but never saw anyone.”

“How drunk was this guest, Mulder?” Scully was acutely aware of the temperature drop as she took a couple of steps forward, glancing over at Mel as she paced the floor, the upper level creaking with every step. “It’s thirty-five after…still have twenty-five minutes before those doors should open and we can get these people to safety.”

“After everything that has happened, Scully,” Mulder could see something buried deep in her eyes, rooted deep in an unspoken phobia, and had an inkling of the answer before he could even finish the question. “…is it so far-fetched to consider the extreme?”

Scully held her lip between her teeth, the weight of the charms tugging at her as she let the flashlight’s arc of illumination drop just a little. “I’m afraid.”

Scully’s admission hit him between the eyes, sinking further than the previous time that he’d heard her say those words as he could actually see the very real alarm in the look on her face. Scully squeezed his fingers before moving diagonally toward the railing, looking back at him as he seemed to glow in the dim. They had been trapped before but adding a crowd of people made the stakes so much higher and made a blitz attack so much more real as flashlights swirled across the limited floorspace, in minute patterns. No one wanted to move and no one dared to leave the corner as Mulder crossed in front of a pillar, extending his pocket light over the railing. The water level was only a few inches from the façade of the stage and the rigging was already beginning to creak with every gust that gripped the brick and mortar.

The fizzing of air meeting water as the doors popped open along the interior walls carried through the space, pulsating from brick to brick as it bounced through the ballroom.

“Agent Scully, behind you!” Mel’s voice sliced through the shrill of wind and water as she slid forward, colliding with the top of a table.

There wasn’t enough time to react, or reach for Scully, as the flash of a wide smile and the sheen of scarlet eyes locked onto Mulder’s deer-in-the-headlights stare. The air went out of Scully’s lungs and her jaw dropped open; a rising finale of a crescendo of a roaring thunderclap meeting the pop and buzz of an unseen bolt of lightning. A wordless, horrified utterance left Scully’s lips as the driven, hungry wraith taken form enveloped her in a hazy fog, illuminated only by a vermillion glare. Mulder extended his arms, fingers gliding through the murk, slipping away like the last grains of sand in an hourglass as Scully was pulled over the balcony’s broad railing. His fingers grazed the wood grain as the sound of a loud, unsettling splash reverberated through the ballroom.

“Scully!” Mulder didn’t hesitate to maneuver over the railing, his eyes on the transient ballistic flow from the drop as he yanked off his coat.

“What in the fuck are you doing, Agent Mulder?” Mel grabbed him by the wrist, stopping his motions from jumping off the railing as she felt the building shake beneath their feet while gesturing for the security guards to shine their lights into the water. “You could hurt her or break your own neck by tossing yourself in there like that…Don’t be an idiot.”

“I’m not letting her drown,” Mulder couldn’t see even the tiniest glimpse of Scully in the growing wash of water below as the ripples continued to reach for the walls. “I’m wasting time holding on up here.”

Mel let go of his wrist and took his pocket light from the hand waving in the air, casting the light down at the mess below. “It’s a quarter till—don’t screw it up.”

The well-intended hostess wouldn’t have stopped Mulder but the gesture had him enduring the last of his anxiety enough to let go. The drop wasn’t far and the air barely kissed his skin before the blast of dirty water consumed him, devouring him without hesitation. Mulder’s last gasp came as the icy draft invaded his nostrils and wormed down his ear canal, thudding against his ear drums. The hollow, pulsating hum rolled and gathered around him as he wildly kicked until his feet touched the floor beneath him, desperate to regain a semblance of footing. It was reminiscent of swimmer’s ear as the fizzing preceded the gasp of air as Mulder’s head came to the surface and wildly turned, searching through the disturbed lake around him. All he could do was search for a sign.

“Do you see her?” Mulder called out, glancing up as he wiped the moisture from his eyes and did a full spin, heartbeat thudding in his throat. “Mel, do you see her?”

“I don’t see anything—not even a splash!” Mel leaned against the railing, flabbergasted by the unfolding scenario as the lights danced through the cloudy water. “That’s not possible…is it? Agent Mulder, is it possible?”

“I don’t know,” Mulder didn’t care about the implication of such a nonpareil as he shifted through the muddled, graying flood around him. “Fuck…come on, Scully! Fight!”

Scully had been under too long but Mulder knew, as his soul burned, that he wasn’t going to let go of his hope or of his determination as his hands trembled under the bubbled surface. Mulder followed the beams of thin, blurred light through the ill-defined sectioned off area of the dance floor, tripping over debris in the process. The building, constructed lake within the walls of the House of Blues was hitting him at chest level, his heels barely balancing against the wood beneath his limbs. The roll of thunder outside only added to the disorientation as it bellowed and emanated from deep within the bowels of the building, shaking every pipe until the foundation simply followed suit. It was then that the remaining doors began clanging against their hinges, ushering in another surge that knocked him clear across the floor and into a support beam with a considerable thrash.

“Shit,” Mulder groaned and held on as the water pressed against him, crushing his ribs.

“Agent Mulder, are you okay?” Mel called down to him, shining her light on his nose as his labored expression only deepened. “What just happened?”

“…No,” Mulder was already close to drowning as he spat out the onslaught of spray into his mouth, choking and gasping for air. “I don’t know…I think another pipe just burst.”

“I will have my pound of flesh,” The feminine, Creole accent was heavy and muddled by the swirling of open current as it thumped against each wall. “Everything you’ve taken, bit by bit, I will take it back.”

A flash of Scully’s porcelain and alabaster cheeks and neck peeled across his field of vision, matched by the flail of fingers into the air toward him, arctic blues wider than they’d ever been before. An unmatched shiver flourished down Mulder’s spine as Scully came into focus along with the undeniable form of their mysterious, quick-moving red-lipped specter. Mulder didn’t dwell on her, in spite of the crimson glare aimed squarely on him, and reached for the delicate fingers arching toward him. As quickly as the familiar warmth of his partner’s fingertips touched his, the mist gathered and the puff of air left his chest, fluttering free with the plume of colored smoke in front of him. A moment of Scully’s visage was nothing more than a cruel tease.

Laveau was toying with him.

“God dammit, where is she?” Mulder’s anger mingled with an emerging trepidation as his wrenching fists disturbed the gathering pond. “Fuck!”

“How many times have you failed to grasp onto her hand and pull her from the darkness?” Laveau’s voice boomed in his ears, swirling through the room and coming at him as though she were dangling by a string. “How many times have you failed her?”

Mulder chased another, fleeting apparition of Scully until the sound of thunder began to blend seamlessly with every splash of water. Mulder could hear Scully saying his name as he reached for her, only strengthening the slap of reality as materialization became anything but. The game of _cat and mouse_ was to Laveau’s benefit and he could hear her cackling with each flinch, each fruitless reach. The seconds were ticking away and the condition of the only woman he trusted with his life was unknown. Mulder couldn’t help but focus on the knowledge that he had been in this position before and the thread holding his psyche together was wearing thin as he leapt toward the stage, grasping onto the brass for dear life as the deluge pressed against his back.

“Who do you love?” Laveau’s voice mocked the signage high above his head as her stare bore through him from the velvet curtain.

“Agent Mulder, she’s over here! Agent Scully is over here!” Mel’s voice pulled him from the abyss as she screamed from the top of the stairs, shining a light as she descended the steps until the water was up to her shins. “She’s not moving!”

Mulder pushed through the water, crossing the ballroom that had become an indoor pool, eclipsing the space as the tangled mess of Scully’s hair shined as they directed their flashlights down at her. “No, no, no, no...Come on, Scully.”

Scully’s petite body maneuvered like a ragdoll in Mulder’s arms as he pulled her from the water, the color all but gone from her skin as he pushed her hair out of her face. There wasn’t enough time to wait for a sign of a heartbeat, or a breath, as he carried her up to the landing, brushing past Mel in the process. Cold wouldn’t have accurately described the state they had found Scully in as her shoulders met the unforgiving chill of the weathered, wood floor. Mulder’s despair became visible, suffocating as he hesitated above Scully and fixated on the dulled color of bloomed irises and milled powder across the swell of her lips. Mulder’s hands shook as the bright, cumulus shaped section along her neck took shape and darkened, highlighting the deep indentation of bite marks just above her collarbone.

“Agent Mulder,” Mel knelt and grasped his shoulder, nearly shaking him off-balance as a streak of flood water dribbled down Scully’s face. “You can save her…bring her back.”

“Scully, you can’t do this to me. Not now, not again,” Mulder tilted her head back, held her nose and gave her his own breath, the chill of her skin radiating against his as he felt her chest resist the air. “God dammit, Scully…please, just breathe.”

The memory of nearly losing her engulfed his awareness, unraveling every string that had been holding together his integrity as tears flowed down the curve of his cheeks. The distance he had gone, even then, to bring her back had barely begun to stack the table for what was at risk as he glanced at her eyelashes as they barely moved in the breeze. The circumstances had altered but the sight of her in that stillness urged him forward as he laced his fingers palm to top, mimicking the frantic beating of his own heart with every compression. Mulder’s world was falling apart as every breath of air became so much more than his unhinged hopes pushing forward from an open mouth as he willed Scully silently to return one of those exhales. Mulder’s knuckles went white as he braced the floor to lean for the fourth time, his elbows shaking as the desperate puff of air left his lungs and pushed against the barrier of water in hers.

That’s when the resistance gave and the ragged exhale was met with a blast of water and a whimper as the color came rushing back to the dulled flesh along Scully’s lips.

“Come on, get it out,” Mulder’s relief was overwhelmed by the, often hidden, emotion running through him as he guided her to a half propped position, helping her to wheeze and cough up the remaining water. “Jesus, Scully, breathe…”

Scully was balancing on the edge of shock as the convulsive level coughs softened and her fingers gripped the front of his shirt, hopelessly pulling him until his chest met her cheek. “I think I just discovered my death phobia, Mulder.”

Mulder glided his index across her chin and made eye contact with her as his left arm wrapped around her, welcoming the shaking as she sobbed into the soaked linen across his chest. “I’m here and I’ve got you.”

“I have cell signal,” One of Mel’s security guards tapped her on the shoulder, pulling her focus from witnessing successful CPR for the first time.

Mel stood and nodded, rubbing her eyes as she watched the water begin to recede through wide, open doors below. “Good…now call for an ambulance and get all of us the _fuck_ out of here.”

An electrical hum filled the ballroom with a static for a long moment as the lights began to stutter before returning to darkness while the loud, simultaneous slam of distant doors triggered the beginning of the end. The water had begun to recede through every open door, in a cascade and through the barricades that resided in the alley. The sound, while unpleasant, was welcomed and a restless, agony stricken crowd took it as their opening to emerge from the confines of the corner; from the protection of each other. Mulder rested back against his haunches, gathering Scully in his arms as his shoulder blades pushed against the railing for stability. Mulder glanced at his watch, as the time slipped over to 4:01 AM, and the strength left his body in the form of an audible exhale as he held Scully tighter. Scully’s fingers coiled unyieldingly around the material of his shirt, refusing to lose that steadiness as warmth began to return.

Scully’s soft, exhausted gaze met Mulder’s as they both could finally hear the approaching sounds of sirens as they hushed the receding river below.

Friday, November 6th 1998, 8:45 PM

Scully’s Apartment

Georgetown, Washington, DC

Scully pulled a decorative box from the shelf of her closet and pulled the string, returning the small space to a dim as she pushed the door closed and moved toward the edge of the bed. Her eyes lingered over the charms hanging on the lampshade next to her as her index fingers tapped the brass enclosure in the center of the lid, popping it free. Thoughts were on the words of the palm reader as she flipped the lid open and slid a few of the tokens from her past to the side until the three, little stones attached to a singular chain caught a glimmer of light. Her thumb grazed the wound, cut sections of moonstone, sapphire, and rose quartz as the silver chain rattled against the mahogany box. All three were a rectangular shaped pendant, wrapped with a coil of wire, emphasizing the crystalline, rough cuts for each one.

“She always had a knack for picking out the ones that were the least gaudy,” Scully held the chain in the air and hung it along the same spot as the charms from New Orleans, gathering them together as though they were destined to be joined. “I should’ve kept every one of my promises.”

Missy’s picture was just out of reach but not so far that her radiant smile wasn’t in full view, almost enough so that Scully could hear her laugh and miss it in the same breath. Scully’s deep V-neck did nothing to hide the bruising along her neck, down to her clavicle, emphasizing the shape of teeth marks. She wondered how imprint hadn’t managed to break the skin and draw blood as her fingers grazed the distinct, tender notches. She winced as hair brushed along the upper curve of the marks, irritating skin that was already crying out, instantly recollecting every second of pain that the city of New Orleans had inflicted on her. Scully tucked the hair back and sighed as she stood and stared at her own reflection, at the yellowing edges gripping her like a hand. On any other day, Scully might’ve hidden every little blemish, but there was strength in it; knowing that some of her aches were worth every second inflicted by the visible imprints on her body.

At least, she had hoped they were worth it as she tucked the box away in the top drawer of the nightstand just as three, sharp knocks carried down the hall.

“Just a second!” Scully came around the corner and flicked the light switch to return the bedroom to the dim, the view of her front door just coming into her line of sight as she met the edge of the couch.

“I’ll just wait out here and keep getting the stare down from your neighbor,” Mulder’s voice was muffled yet clear as she reached for the lock, a chuckle buried in his comment as the mechanism clicked.

Scully held the door open and found him holding a non-descript takeout bag with little dots of grease along the sides, a boyish smile hiding as he turned to look at her. “You’d think she’d be used to you showing up here as often as you do. Did you bring me a peace offering for forcing me to stay home for the fifth day running?”

“Actually, I brought fried rice, dumplings, and orange chicken because I’m still taking the solo ass-reaming while you are here letting that heal,” Mulder nodded toward her, indicating the big, purple elephant in the room as he crossed the threshold and bit down on the corner of his lip. “How is all of that feeling?”

The door and lock shifted back into place as Scully listened to the sound of the bag touching the top of the table with a rustling tap before turning to make eye contact with him. “I don’t know if I can accurately describe it as anything other than to say that it feels like I’m acutely aware of the fact that I narrowly escaped death and I have the bite marks to show for it.”

“Kind of getting the impression you would’ve preferred the other fate?” Mulder pulled the Styrofoam containers from the bag, the question hanging in the air like a fog as he swallowed hard and diverted his gaze to the floor. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you had.”

“I know,” Scully had seen that look in his eyes once before and the same prickle was nipping at her senses as she held a puff of air, exhaling slowly. “Speaking of that ass-reaming…has any information come from the disappearance of Daliah or the three girls?”

“Shortly after the flood water had receded, leaving nothing more than a muddy void to clean up, the local police found the missing remains of Ayanna, Kya, and Madeleine buried in a makeshift tomb just feet from Marie Laveau’s crypt,” Mulder felt those steel blues washing over him, searing a hole into his soul as he folded the empty paper sack. “They found another altar near the three that the girls had set up and the plot only thickened from there.”

“Dropping little clues for me to nibble on, Mulder?” Scully raised an eyebrow and purposely invaded his personal space as he turned around to throw the bag into the bin next to her trash. “…Really?”

The bag left his fingers and sailed into the container that needed to be empty, a smirk forming as Scully’s body heat radiated against his abs. “Daliah’s eyes, tongue, and heart wrapped in a silk cloth with a Creole script written across it. It translated roughly to _I give my vessel, freely_.”

“Is this being filed away as a completed, closed case or do you have a theory that you’ve chosen, strategically, to keep to yourself because of its implications?” Scully asked, a dull throb building along the edges of her bruising as she looked up at him, scrutinizing his eyes more deeply than she had in a long time.

“One case has been marked as closed while another is left unsolved with the pattern between them that could be categorized and easily referenced,” Mulder’s index traced the curve of her jaw from ear to center, eliciting a comfortable sigh as she blinked slowly. “We don’t have to talk about this tonight, Scully. You’ve been through enough.”

“I am a lot of things, Mulder, but breakable isn’t one of them,” Scully evaded his touch to gather her composure as she took a step back, leaving the scent of her vanilla and sandalwood lotion hovering in the air between them. “Please don’t treat me like today is the day that I’ll shatter into a million, irreparable pieces.”

Mulder drew her into an embrace, gathering his hands at the space between her shoulders while his lips found the top of her head, breathing her in. “It isn’t that at all, Scully…you’re not the fragile one this time. It’s me and it’s probably always been me.”

“I need you to talk to me,” Scully angled her chin up to look at him, the beating of his heart reverberating through her as she returned his embrace. “Don’t shelter this when we’ve been through so much already.”

Mulder broke their contact and leaned against the back of the sofa, white knuckling the top as he held on and stared at the floor. “I had a split-second thought that I was going to lose you between chest compressions and breaths of air when you weren’t responsive and I nearly froze. I didn’t know if I could bring you back and I heard that woman’s voice asking me how many times I’ve failed you.”

“Mulder…” Scully didn’t move from the spot in the kitchen but pivoted her hips to look in his direction.

“No, I need to say it, Scully,” Mulder swallowed hard, the knee-jerk recollection bubbling to the surface as he met her gaze in spite of himself. “I don’t want to keep putting your life at risk day in and out or lead you into the darkness to go chasing after something you don’t believe in.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that you’re the only one I’d ever go headlong into the dark for?” Scully raised her voice, the frustration swelling as she narrowed her eyes at him and tapered the distance between them. “It has nothing to do with what I believe in as long as I believe in_ you_…don’t you understand that?”

Silence hung in the air and added another weight to the string of hang-ups that dangled between them. Inaction had become uncertainty and laconism transformed into no longer having anything to say as both stared at the divider between rooms like it was a line in the sand marked _do not cross_. Scully shook her head and wiped her tears as she dared to look at him, quietly challenging him to take the same risk. Mulder’s chin lifted and his head tilted as her open invitation lit up like a Christmas tree in the form of shiny tears and rosy cheeks. Scully was at her most vulnerable but on that very same side of the coin, she was also at her most beautiful for all of the right reasons.

“Do you _really_ believe in _me_ or have you just given in enough to let it lull you to sleep?” Mulder’s spine went rigid as he pressed his lips together, letting those blue eyes disarm him fully.

“I really do believe in you, Mulder,” Scully blinked another trail of tears and let them ignite a path of salt clear to her chin as she chewed her lip. “The only thing I’ve ever given in to doing was finally letting you in…don’t make me regret it.”

“I don’t deserve you,” Mulder let it pass through his lips like a confession and watched her suck a puff of air through the tiniest of gaps between her lips.

“Kiss me like it were the last time you could,” Scully felt her heart beating into her throat as the request felt more like a demand while her legs barely held her up as her knees buckled beneath her.

Everything fell into place as the brewing tears in Scully’s eyes collided with the fractured and poorly constructed wall that Mulder had built around his heart, exposing the pair of raw souls that had been hiding from one another. Scully was the gasoline on the open flame and Mulder craved the fire as he watched her wipe the trails of salt and sea from her cheeks. Scully was no more than an arm’s length away but Mulder simply gazed at her, drinking in the sight of her vulnerability bleeding through. The world didn’t need to exist for a moment as they found that spark all over again that had barely begun to brew in a hotel room in a power outage. It was as though the light had finally been turned on while they groped their way through the dark.

Mulder met her in the middle, seeking out her mouth with a renewed hunger while his fingers rolled across the small of her back. Pure magnetism met as mouths opened and hands clung to more closeness, the heat intoxicating as eyes fluttered shut. Scully tugged him closer, nibbling at his bottom lip while her fingers dug into his shoulders for leverage and balance alike. Mulder ran his fingers through her hair, settling his touch along the nape of her neck as his free hand snaked under her arms and settled at her back until she was standing on the tips of her toes in front of him. Scully moaned into his mouth as he gave her hair a gentle tug, tilting her head a little more as Mulder’s teeth grazed her bottom lip. Familiarity crashed against urgency as Scully’s back pushed against the wall and her elbow knocked against a stand as she scooted her backside onto it, unceremoniously tipping over an entire row of books in a single sweep. The resounding thudding as the row hit the floor pulled their focus just enough to end their kiss prematurely, much to their chagrin.

“You know, the food you brought is going to get cold,” Scully involuntarily gasped as Mulder guided her legs around him and lifted her into the air, moving in the direction of the bedroom.

Mulder was already halfway down the hallway, intention in his eyes, as he gave her ass a generous, promising squeeze while her lips teased space below his mouth. “It’s a good thing everything reheats well.”

A mutual, soft smile formed on both of their lips as they waited in the doorway, dancing around another long, hunger driven kiss while Mulder darted his foot to one side to give the door a generous kick closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To Monika and Cate...you listened to the manic behavior for weeks while I worked my way through this. Thank you for never letting me give up or in on this one. It was worth the fight.
> 
> Quotes by:  
Jay Asher  
Edgar Allan Poe
> 
> References made to the movie "Carrie". I had to, it was too perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> Jessica, I truly hope that you are ok with the stretch on your prompt. I wanted you to really adore this without going too far outside of your constructs or, worse, grossing you out...I didn't know how this would turn out but the story spoke to me and I ran with it. You inspired me to push my own limitations since I have never written two fics for a single exchange before. I hope you love it.
> 
> As always, Monika and Cate -- I would have lost my mind again without you both. This one was a testament to pushing through and I owe you two so much.
> 
> Nicole, I love you. Thank you for making these possible.


End file.
